Category: Georgia

2015 Redneck Olympic Games in Georgia

On By A.P.In GeorgiaLeave a comment

By David Sharp

There were no world-class athletes or top-notch sporting venues, but there was cold beer, barbecue and a muddy tug-of-war Saturday at the event formerly known as the Redneck Olympics.

The event, now officially known as the “Redneck (Blank)” after the real Olympics threatened to sue, also featured bobbing for pig’s feet, a greased watermelon haul and toilet seat horseshoes.

If that’s not redneck enough, then there was a wife-hauling contest and free mud runs for big-tired trucks.

Organizer Harold Brooks said it’s all about regular folks having fun without airs of pretentiousness.

“For me, a redneck doesn’t mean a person who’s dumb or lazy. A redneck to me means someone who can laugh at themselves. They’re a hard-working group of people who can let loose and have a good time,” he said.

On Saturday, a cacophony of loud music and roaring engines were set against a dusty backdrop in the hills of western Maine where several thousand people gathered. People paraded around in every manner of vehicle: pickups, all-terrain vehicles, dirt bikes, go-karts — and even a snowmobile.

Many spectators watching the trucks churning across the mud course ended up covered in mud themselves.

“It’s a big, dirty party,” said Sara Miller, of Manchester, New Hampshire.

Crowds were encouraged to get into the act during the “competition,” but actual athletic skills were not a requirement. For example, one of the events called the “beer trot” featured an obstacle course that participants traversed while carrying a beer in each hand. The goal was to finish quickly — without spilling.

There were faux gold, silver and bronze medals for winners. But these aren’t Olympic events. The U.S. Olympic Committee put the kibosh on the “Redneck Olympics” name in 2011, Brooks said.

That doesn’t mean rednecks went down without a fight.

On Saturday, T-shirts were emblazoned with “Redneck Olympics” — with “Olympics” crossed out.

Brooks said his event is more fun and affordable than the real Olympic Games, which he believes has grown too big for its britches.

“The average redneck couldn’t afford to go the Olympics,” he said.

http://bigstory.ap.org/6607744eed884e5ca23a76b638ceaa3a

Could Pot Help Veterans With PTSD? Brain Scientists Say Maybe

On By A.P.In Andrew Holmes, anxiety circuitry, Atlanta, brain, cannabinoids, cannabis, Cannabis sativa, Drugs, Emory University, Emory University School of Medicine, extinction therapy, fear circuitry, Georgia, Jon Hamilton, Kerry Ressler, marijuana, Medicine, military, National Institute of Mental Health, National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, National Institute on Drug Abuse, Neuropsychiatric Disease, Neuroscience, neuroscientist, post-traumatic stress disorder, pot, psychiatrist, Psychiatry, psychology, psychotherapy, PTSD, Science, tetrahydrocannabinol, THC, VeteransLeave a comment

pot

by Jon Hamilton

Veterans who smoke marijuana to cope with post-traumatic stress disorder may be onto something. There’s growing evidence that pot can affect brain circuits involved in PTSD.

Experiments in animals show that tetrahydrocannabinol, the chemical that gives marijuana its feel-good qualities, acts on a system in the brain that is “critical for fear and anxiety modulation,” says Andrew Holmes, a researcher at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. But he and other brain scientists caution that marijuana has serious drawbacks as a potential treatment for PTSD.

The use of marijuana for PTSD has gained national attention in the past few years as thousands of traumatized veterans who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan have asked the federal government to give them access to the drug. Also, Maine and a handful of other states have passed laws giving people with PTSD access to medical marijuana.

But there’s never been a rigorous scientific study to find out whether marijuana actually helps people with PTSD. So lawmakers and veterans groups have relied on anecdotes from people with the disorder and new research on how both pot and PTSD works in the brain.

An Overactive Fear System

When a typical person encounters something scary, the brain’s fear system goes into overdrive, says Dr. Kerry Ressler of Emory University. The heart pounds, muscles tighten. Then, once the danger is past, everything goes back to normal, he says.

But Ressler says that’s not what happens in the brain of someone with PTSD. “One way of thinking about PTSD is an overactivation of the fear system that can’t be inhibited, can’t be normally modulated,” he says.

For decades, researchers have suspected that marijuana might help people with PTSD by quieting an overactive fear system. But they didn’t understand how this might work until 2002, when scientists in Germany published a mouse study showing that the brain uses chemicals called cannabinoids to modulate the fear system, Ressler says.

There are two common sources of cannabinoids. One is the brain itself, which uses the chemicals to regulate a variety of brain cells. The other common source is Cannabis sativa, the marijuana plant.

So in recent years, researchers have done lots of experiments that involved treating traumatized mice with the active ingredient in pot, tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), Ressler says. And in general, he says, the mice who get THC look “less anxious, more calm, you know, many of the things that you might imagine.”

Problems with Pot

Unfortunately, THC’s effect on fear doesn’t seem to last, Ressler says, because prolonged exposure seems to make brain cells less sensitive to the chemical.

Another downside to using marijuana for PTSD is side effects, says Andrew Holmes at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. “You may indeed get a reduction in anxiety,” Holmes says. “But you’re also going to get all of these unwanted effects,” including short-term memory loss, increased appetite and impaired motor skills.

So for several years now, Holmes and other scientists have been testing drugs that appear to work like marijuana, but with fewer drawbacks. Some of the most promising drugs amplify the effect of the brain’s own cannabinoids, which are called endocannabinoids, he says. “What’s encouraging about the effects of these endocannabinoid-acting drugs is that they may allow for long-term reductions in anxiety, in other words weeks if not months.”

The drugs work well in mice, Holmes says. But tests in people are just beginning and will take years to complete. In the meantime, researchers are learning more about how marijuana and THC affect the fear system in people.

At least one team has had success giving a single dose of THC to people during something called extinction therapy. The therapy is designed to teach the brain to stop reacting to something that previously triggered a fearful response.

The team’s study found that people who got THC during the therapy had “long-lasting reductions in anxiety, very similar to what we were seeing in our animal models,” Holmes says. So THC may be most useful when used for a short time in combination with other therapy, he says.

As studies continue to suggest that marijuana can help people with PTSD, it may be unrealistic to expect people with the disorder to wait for something better than marijuana and THC, Ressler says. “I’m a pragmatist,” he says. “I think if there are medications including drugs like marijuana that can be used in the right way, there’s an opportunity there, potentially.”

http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2013/12/23/256610483/could-pot-help-veterans-with-ptsd-brain-scientists-say-maybe

Atlanta man shatters coast-to-coast ‘Cannonball Run’ speed record

On By A.P.In Alex Roy, Atlanta, BMW, Brock Yates, Burt Reynolds, Cannonball Baker Sea-To-Shining-Sea Memorial Trophy Dash, Cannonball Run, Crime, Dan Huang, Dave Black, David Maher, Ed Bolian, fraternity of lunatics, Georgia, Human Behavior, Lamborghini, Mercedes, Portofino Hotel and Marina, Red Ball Garage, Rolls-Royce, Sammy Davis Jr.Leave a comment

cannonball run

Before the transcontinental race in “Cannonball Run,” the starter tells the gathered racers, “You all are certainly the most distinguished group of highway scofflaws and degenerates ever gathered together in one place.”

Ed Bolian prefers the term “fraternity of lunatics.”

Where the 1981 Burt Reynolds classic was a comedic twist on a race inspired by real-life rebellion over the mandated 55-mph speed limits of the 1970s, Bolian set out on a serious mission to beat the record for driving from New York to Los Angeles.

The mark? Alex Roy and David Maher’s cross-country record of 31 hours and 4 minutes, which they set in a modified BMW M5 in 2006.

Bolian, a 28-year-old Atlanta native, had long dreamed of racing from East Coast to West. A decade ago, for a high school assignment, Bolian interviewed Brock Yates, who conceived the Cannonball Baker Sea-To-Shining-Sea Memorial Trophy Dash, aka the Cannonball Run.

Yates, who played the previously quoted organizer in the film he wrote himself, won the first Cannonball in the early 1970s with a time of 35 hours and 53 minutes.

“I told him, ‘One day I’d like to beat your record,’ ” Bolian recalled.

It sounds like great outlaw fun — and certainly, Hollywood added its embellishments, like the supremely confident, infidel-cursing sheik with a Rolls Royce and Sammy Davis Jr. in a priest getup — but Bolian said it took considerable research and groundwork.

Beginning in 2009, about the time he started working for Lamborghini Atlanta, Bolian researched cars, routes, moon phases, traffic patterns, equipment, gas mileage and modifications.

He went into preparation mode about 18 months ago and chose a Mercedes CL55 AMG with 115,000 miles for the journey. The Benz’s gas tank was only 23 gallons, so he added two 22-gallon tanks in the trunk, upping his range to about 800 miles. The spare tire had to go in the backseat with his spotter, Dan Huang, a student at Georgia Tech, Bolian’s alma mater.

To foil the police, he installed a switch to kill the rear lights and bought two laser jammers and three radar detectors. He commissioned a radar jammer, but it wasn’t finished in time for the trek. There was also a police scanner, two GPS units and various chargers for smartphones and tablets — not to mention snacks, iced coffee and a bedpan.

By the time he tricked out the Benz, which included a $9,000 tuneup, “it was a real space station of a thing,” he said, describing the lights and screens strewn through the car’s cockpit.

Yet he still wasn’t done.

“The hardest thing, quite honestly, was finding people crazy enough to do it with me,” he said.

Co-driver Dave Black, one of the Atlanta Lamborghini dealership’s customers, didn’t sign on until three days before they left, and “support passenger” Huang didn’t get involved until about 18 hours before the team left Atlanta for Manhattan.

If his difficulty finding a copilot wasn’t an omen, Manhattan would deliver one. While scouting routes out of the city, a GPS unit told Bolian to take a right on red, in the wrong direction down a one-way road. He was quickly pulled over.

Bolian got a warning — and a healthy dose of relief that the officer didn’t question the thick odor of fuel as he stood over the vents pumping fumes from the trunk.

The trio ignored what some might have considered a harbinger and the left the Red Ball Garage on East 31st Street, the starting point for Yates’ Cannonball, a few hours later. To be exact, they left October 19 at 9:55 p.m., according to a tracking company whose officials asked not be identified because they were unaware that Bolian would be driving so illegally when he hired them.

They hit a patch of traffic in New York that held them up for 15 minutes but soon had an average speed of about 90 mph. In Pennsylvania, they tapped the first of many scouts, one of Bolian’s acquaintances who drove the speed limit 150 to 200 miles ahead of the CL55 and warned them of any police, construction or other problems.

They blew through Ohio, Indiana and Illinois, hitting St. Louis before dawn.

“Everything possible went perfect,” Bolian said, explaining they never got lost and rarely encountered traffic or construction delays.

By the time they hit southern Missouri, near the Oklahoma border, they learned they were “on track to break the existing record if they averaged the speed limit for the rest of the trip,” he said.

Yeah, right. This wasn’t about doing speed limits.

They kept humming west, and as they neared the Texas-New Mexico border, they calculated they might beat the 30-hour mark, a sort of Holy Grail in transcontinental racing that Bolian likened to the 4-minute mile.

Not one to settle, “we decided to break 29,” Bolian said.

The unnamed tracking company says the Benz pulled into the Portofino Hotel and Marina in Redondo Beach, California, at 11:46 p.m. on October 20 after driving 2,803 miles. The total time: 28 hours, 50 minutes and about 30 seconds.

“Most of the time, we weren’t going insanely fast,” Bolian said, not realizing his definition of “insanely” is a little different from most folks’.

When they were moving, which, impressively, was all but 46 minutes of the trip, they were averaging around 100 mph. Their total average was 98 mph, and their top speed was 158 mph, according to an onboard tracking device.

“Apart from a FedEx truck not checking his mirrors before he tried to merge on top of me, we didn’t really have any issues,” Bolian said.

He concedes his endeavor was a dangerous one, especially when you consider Bolian slept only 40 minutes of the trip, and co-driver Black slept an hour. But Bolian went out of his way to make it as safe as possible, choosing a weekend day with clear weather and a full moon — and routes, when possible, with little traffic or construction.

“I had plenty of people at home praying I’d make it safely, and, more importantly, had my wife praying that I wouldn’t have to do it again,” he said, adding he has no children, which was also a factor. “That was one of the spurs to go ahead and get this over with. That’s probably the next adventure.”

Asked if the technological advances since the previous record holders made their run gave him an advantage, Bolian replied, “Absolutely.” Because two teams broke the 32-hour mark in 2006 and 2007, he had a detailed “guide book” on how to do it, where they had to rely on word-of-mouth tales from the 1980s.

“I thank Alex for that. We’re all adding chapters to the same story of American car culture,” Bolian said. Alex Roy did not respond to an e-mail seeking comment.

Bolian had hoped to revisit that high school interview and tell Yates he’d followed through on that promise to break his record, but Yates now suffers from Alzheimer’s.

“I’ll pay him a visit just for the sake of it,” Bolian said, “but I can’t tell him.”

Where the Cannonball scofflaws aimed to make a statement about personal freedom, Bolian said he has the utmost respect for law enforcement. His goal was merely to “add myself and pay tribute to this chapter of automotive history,” he said.

Bolian also hopes that he shattered Roy’s record by such a stark margin that it discourages would-be Cannonballers from attempting to break his record, and it’s not just a matter of his own legacy, he said.

“It really isn’t something we need a whole band of lunatics doing,” he said.

http://www.cnn.com/2013/10/31/us/new-york-los-angeles-cannonball-speed-record/index.html?hpt=hp_c2

Fruit flies force their young to drink alcohol for protection

On By A.P.In alcohol, alcohol abuse, alcoholism, Atlanta, Balint Zacsoh, drosophila, Emory University School of Medicine, Ethanol, fruit fly, Georgia, Nathan Mortimer, Nature, neuropeptide F, neuropeptide Y, Neuroscience, NPF, NPY, Science, stress, The Brain, Todd Schlenke, wasp, Zachary LynchLeave a comment

130222102958-large
The fruit fly study adds to the evidence “that using toxins in the environment to medicate offspring may be common across the animal kingdom,” says biologist Todd Schlenke.

When fruit flies sense parasitic wasps in their environment, they lay their eggs in an alcohol-soaked environment, essentially forcing their larvae to consume booze as a drug to combat the deadly wasps.

The discovery by biologists at Emory University was published in the journal Science on February 22.

“The adult flies actually anticipate an infection risk to their children, and then they medicate them by depositing them in alcohol,” says Todd Schlenke, the evolutionary geneticist whose lab did the research. “We found that this medicating behavior was shared by diverse fly species, adding to the evidence that using toxins in the environment to medicate offspring may be common across the animal kingdom.”

Adult fruit flies detect the wasps by sight, and appear to have much better vision than previously realized, he adds. “Our data indicate that the flies can visually distinguish the relatively small morphological differences between male and female wasps, and between different species of wasps.”

The experiments were led by Balint Zacsoh, who recently graduated from Emory with a degree in biology and still works in the Schlenke lab. The team also included Emory graduate student Zachary Lynch and postdoc Nathan Mortimer.

The larvae of the common fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, eat the rot, or fungi and bacteria, that grows on overripe, fermenting fruit. They have evolved a certain amount of resistance to the toxic effects of the alcohol levels in their natural habitat, which can range up to 15 percent.

Tiny, endoparasitoid wasps are major killers of fruit flies. The wasps inject their eggs inside the fruit fly larvae, along with venom that aims to suppress their hosts’ cellular immune response. If the flies fail to kill the wasp egg, a wasp larva hatches inside the fruit fly larva and begins to eat its host from the inside out.

Last year, the Schlenke lab published a study showing how fruit fly larvae infected with wasps prefer to eat food high in alcohol. This behavior greatly improves the survival rate of the fruit flies because they have evolved high tolerance of the toxic effects of the alcohol, but the wasps have not.

“The fruit fly larvae raise their blood alcohol levels, so that the wasps living in their blood will suffer,” Schlenke says. “When you think of an immune system, you usually think of blood cells and immune proteins, but behavior can also be a big part of an organism’s immune defense.”

For the latest study, the researchers asked whether the fruit fly parents could sense when their children were at risk for infection, and whether they then sought out alcohol to prophylactically medicate them.

Adult female fruit flies were released in one mesh cage with parasitic wasps and another mesh cage with no wasps. Both cages had two petri dishes containing yeast, the nourishment for lab-raised fruit flies and their larvae. The yeast in one of the petri dishes was mixed with 6 percent alcohol, while the yeast in the other dish was alcohol free. After 24 hours, the petri dishes were removed and the researchers counted the eggs that the fruit flies had laid.

The results were dramatic. In the mesh cage with parasitic wasps, 90 percent of the eggs laid were in the dish containing alcohol. In the cage with no wasps, only 40 percent of the eggs were in the alcohol dish.

“The fruit flies clearly change their reproductive behavior when the wasps are present,” Schlenke says. “The alcohol is slightly toxic to the fruit flies as well, but the wasps are a bigger danger than the alcohol.”

The fly strains used in the experiments have been bred in the lab for decades. “The flies that we work with have not seen wasps in their lives before, and neither have their ancestors going back hundreds of generations,” Schlenke says. “And yet, the flies still recognize these wasps as a danger when they are put in a cage with them.”

Further experiments showed that the flies are extremely discerning about differences in the wasps. They preferred to lay their eggs in alcohol when female wasps were present, but not if only male wasps were in the cage.

Theorizing that the flies were reacting to pheromones, the researchers conducted experiments using two groups of mutated fruit flies. One group lacked the ability to smell, and another group lacked sight. The flies unable to smell, however, still preferred to lay their eggs in alcohol when female wasps were present. The blind flies did not make the distinction, choosing the non-alcohol food for their offspring, even in the presence of female wasps.

“This result was a surprise to me,” Schlenke says. “I thought the flies were probably using olfaction to sense the female wasps. The small, compound eyes of flies are believed to be more geared to detecting motion than high-resolution images.”

The only obvious visual differences between the female and male wasps, he adds, is that the males have longer antennae, slightly smaller bodies, and lack an ovipositor.

Further experimentation showed that the fruit flies can distinguish different species of wasps, and will only choose the alcohol food in response to wasp species that infect larvae, not fly pupae. “Fly larvae usually leave the food before they pupate,” Schlenke explains, “so there is likely little benefit to laying eggs at alcoholic sites when pupal parasites are present.”

The researchers also connected the exposure to female parasitic wasps to changes in a fruit fly neuropeptide.

Stress, and the resulting reduced level of neuropeptide F, or NPF, has previously been associated with alcohol-seeking behavior in fruit flies. Similarly, levels of a homologous neuropeptide in humans, NPY, is associated with alcoholism.

We found that when a fruit fly is exposed to female parasitic wasps, this exposure reduces the level of NPF in the fly brain, causing the fly to seek out alcoholic sites for oviposition,” Schlenke says. “Furthermore, the alcohol-seeking behavior appears to remain for the duration of the fly’s life, even when the parasitic wasps are no longer present, an example of long-term memory.”

Finally, Drosophila melanogaster is not unique in using this offspring medication behavior. “We tested a number of fly species,” Schlenke says, “and found that each fly species that uses rotting fruit for food mounts this immune behavior against parasitic wasps. Medication may be far more common in nature than we previously thought.”

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/02/130222102958.htm

Microbes discovered to be thriving high in the atmosphere

On By A.P.In Atlanta, atmosphere, Bacteria, Bacteria, Dale Griffin, David Smith, DNA, Georgia, Georgia Institute of Technology, Kostas Konstantinidis, microbe, microbiology, Nature, oxalic acid, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Science, sky microbiome, troposphere, U.S. Geological Survey, WeatherLeave a comment

sn-atmosphere

Each year, hundreds of millions of metric tons of dust, water, and humanmade pollutants make their way into the atmosphere, often traveling between continents on jet streams. Now a new study confirms that some microbes make the trip with them, seeding the skies with billions of bacteria and other organisms—and potentially affecting the weather. What’s more, some of these high-flying organisms may actually be able to feed while traveling through the clouds, forming an active ecosystem high above the surface of the Earth.

The discovery came about when a team of scientists based at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta hitched a ride on nine NASA airplane flights aimed at studying hurricanes. Previous studies carried out at the tops of mountains hinted that researchers were likely to find microorganisms at high altitudes, but no one had ever attempted to catalog the microscopic life floating above the oceans—let alone during raging tropical storms. After all, it isn’t easy to take air samples while your plane is flying through a hurricane.

Despite the technical challenges, the researchers managed to collect thousands upon thousands of airborne microorganisms floating in the troposphere about 10 kilometers over the Caribbean, as well as the continental United States and the coast of California. Studying their genes back on Earth, the scientists counted an average of 5100 bacterial cells per cubic meter of air, they report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Although the researchers also captured various types of fungal cells, the bacteria were over two orders of magnitude more abundant in their samples. Well over 60% of all the microbes collected were still alive.

The researchers cataloged a total of 314 different families of bacteria in their samples. Because the type of genetic analysis they used didn’t allow them to identify precise species, it’s not clear if any of the bugs they found are pathogens. Still, the scientists offer the somewhat reassuring news that bacteria associated with human and animal feces only showed up in the air samples taken after Hurricanes Karl and Earl. In fact, these storms seemed to kick up a wide variety of microbes, especially from populated areas, that don’t normally make it to the troposphere.

This uptick in aerial microbial diversity after hurricanes supports the idea that the storms “serve as an atmospheric escalator,” plucking dirt, dust, seawater, and, now, microbes off Earth’s surface and carrying them high into the sky, says Dale Griffin, an environmental and public health microbiologist with the U.S. Geological Survey in St. Petersburg, Florida, who was not involved in the study.

Although many of the organisms borne aloft are likely occasional visitors to the upper troposphere, 17 types of bacteria turned up in every sample. Researchers like environmental microbiologist and co-author Kostas Konstantinidis suspect that these microbes may have evolved to survive for weeks in the sky, perhaps as a way to travel from place to place and spread their genes across the globe. “Not everybody makes it up there,” he says. “It’s only a few that have something unique about their cells” that allows them survive the trip.

The scientists point out that two of the 17 most common families of bacteria in the upper troposphere feed on oxalic acid, one of the most abundant chemical compounds in the sky. This observation raises the question of whether the traveling bacteria might be eating, growing, and perhaps even reproducing 10 kilometers above the surface of Earth. “That’s a big question in the field right now,” Griffin says. “Can you view [the atmosphere] as an ecosystem?”

David Smith, a microbiologist at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, warns against jumping to such dramatic conclusions. He also observed a wide variety of microbes in the air above Oregon’s Mount Bachelor in a separate study, but he believes they must hibernate for the duration of their long, cold trips between far-flung terrestrial ecosystems. “While it’s really exciting to think about microorganisms in the atmosphere that are potentially making a living, there’s no evidence of that so far.”

Even if microbes spend their atmospheric travels in dormancy, that doesn’t mean they don’t have a job to do up there. Many microbial cells are the perfect size and texture to cause water vapor to condense or even form ice around them, meaning that they may be able to seed clouds. If these microorganisms are causing clouds to form, they could be having a substantial impact on the weather. By continuing to study the sky’s microbiome, Konstantinidis and his team hope to soon be able to incorporate its effects into atmospheric models.

http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2013/01/microbes-survive-and-maybe-thriv.html

The brain’s natural valium

On By A.P.In Anxiety, benzodiazepine, Boston, caffeine, cerebrospinal fluid, Clifford Saper, CSF, David Rye, Drugs, Elio Lugaresi, Emory University School of Medicine, flumazenil, GABA, Georgia, Harvard Medical School, Harvard University, Hoffmann-La Roche, Medicine, narcolepsy, neural activity, neurologist, Neuropsychiatric Disease, Neuroscience, Northwestern University, primary hypersomnia, Science, Science Translational Medicine, soporific compound, The BrainLeave a comment

sn-sleep

Hitting the wall in the middle of a busy work day is nothing unusual, and a caffeine jolt is all it takes to snap most of us back into action. But people with certain sleep disorders battle a powerful urge to doze throughout the day, even after sleeping 10 hours or more at night. For them, caffeine doesn’t touch the problem, and more potent prescription stimulants aren’t much better. Now, a study with a small group of patients suggests that their condition may have a surprising source: a naturally occurring compound that works on the brain much like the key ingredients in chill pills such as Valium and Xanax.

The condition is known as primary hypersomnia, and it differs from the better known sleep disorder narcolepsy in that patients tend to have more persistent daytime sleepiness instead of sudden “sleep attacks.” The unknown cause and lack of treatment for primary hypersomnia has long frustrated David Rye, a neurologist at Emory University in Atlanta. “A third of our patients are on disability,” he says, “and these are 20- and 30-year-old people.”

Rye and colleagues began the new study with a hunch about what was going on. Several drugs used to treat insomnia promote sleep by targeting receptors for GABA, a neurotransmitter that dampens neural activity. Rye hypothesized that his hypersomnia patients might have some unknown compound in their brains that does something similar, enhancing the activity of so-called GABAA receptors. To try to find this mystery compound, he and his colleagues performed spinal taps on 32 hypersomnia patients and collected cerebrospinal fluid (CSF), the liquid that bathes and insulates the brain and spinal cord. Then they added the patients’ CSF to cells genetically engineered to produce GABAA receptors, and looked for tiny electric currents that would indicate that the receptors had been activated.

In that first pass, nothing happened. However, when the researchers added the CSF and a bit of GABA to the cells, they saw an electrical response that was nearly twice as big as that caused by GABA alone. All of this suggests that the patients’ CSF doesn’t activate GABAA receptors directly, but it does make the receptors almost twice as sensitive to GABA, the researchers report today in Science Translational Medicine. This effect is similar to that of drugs called benzodiazepines, the active ingredients in antianxiety drugs such as Valium. It did not occur when the researchers treated the cells with CSF from people with normal sleep patterns.

Follow-up experiments suggested that the soporific compound in the patients’ CSF is a peptide or small protein, presumably made by the brain, but otherwise its identity remains a mystery.

The idea that endogenous benzodiazepinelike compounds could cause hypersomnia was proposed in the early 1990s by Elio Lugaresi, a pioneering Italian sleep clinician, says Clifford Saper, a neuroscientist at Harvard Medical School in Boston. But several of Lugaresi’s patients later turned out to be taking benzodiazepines, which undermined his argument, and the idea fell out of favor. Saper says the new work makes a “pretty strong case.”

Based on these results, Rye and his colleagues designed a pilot study with seven patients using a drug called flumazenil, which counteracts benzodiazepines and is often used to treat people who overdose on those drugs. After an injection of flumazenil, the patients improved to near-normal levels on several measures of alertness and vigilance, the researchers report. Rye says these effects lasted up to a couple hours.

In hopes of longer-lasting benefits, the researchers persuaded the pharmaceutical company Hoffmann-La Roche, which makes the drug, to donate a powdered form that can be incorporated into dissolvable tablets taken under the tongue and a cream applied to the skin. One 30-something patient has been taking these formulations for 4 years and has improved dramatically, the researchers report in the paper. She has resumed her career as an attorney, from which her hypersomnia had forced her to take a leave of absence.

The findings are “certainly provocative,” Saper says, although they’ll have to be replicated in a larger, double-blind trial to be truly convincing.

Even so, says Phyllis Zee, a neurologist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois: “This gives us a new window into thinking about treatments” for primary hypersomnia. “These patients don’t respond well to stimulants,” Zee says, so a better strategy may be to inhibit the sleep-promoting effects of GABA—or as Rye puts it, releasing the parking brake instead of pressing the accelerator.

The next steps are clear, Rye says: Identify the mystery compound, figure out a faster way to detect it, and conduct a larger clinical trial to test the benefits of flumazenil. However, the researchers first need someone to fund such a study. So far, Rye says, they’ve gotten no takers.

http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2012/11/putting-themselves-to-sleep.html

New SARS-like virus can infect both humans and animals

On By A.P.In ACE2, Bat, Chinese horseshoe bats, Christian Drosten, coronavirus, Emory University School of Medicine, Erasmus MC, Georgia, Germany, hCoV-EMC, human coronavirus-Erasmus Medical Center, Jordan, Larry Anderson, mBio, Middle East, Netherlands, pneumonia, Qatar, Rotterdam, SARS, SARS outbreak, Saudi Arabia, University of Bonn Medical Center, virologist, virology, VirusLeave a comment

sn-coronavirus

 

A SARS-like virus discovered this summer in the Middle East may infect more than just humans. The pathogen, a close cousin to the one that caused the 2002 to 2003 SARS outbreak, may also be able to infect cells from pigs and a wide range of bat species, researchers report today. The findings may help public health officials track the source of the outbreak and identify the role of wild animals and livestock in spreading the virus, researchers say.

Scientists first detected the virus in a 60-year-old man from Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, who developed severe pneumonia this past spring. Unable to identify the microbe causing the illness, doctors sent samples to Erasmus MC in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. There, scientists identified the infectious agent as a coronavirus, a group known to cause many ailments, such as the common cold and a variety of gastrointestinal infections. Cases have popped up in Qatar and Jordan as well; in total, researchers have so far confirmed nine infections, including five deaths. Several other cases are suspected but haven’t been confirmed.

Researchers have fully sequenced the virus, which they dubbed hCoV-EMC (short for human coronavirus-Erasmus Medical Center). The genome revealed that it is closely related to the SARS coronavirus.

The new study, published online in mBio, is an attempt to answer other basic questions, such as where the virus originated, how it enters cells, and what other animals it might infect, says Christian Drosten, a virologist at the University of Bonn Medical Center in Germany and one of the lead authors.

Scientists knew that the SARS virus uses a receptor called ACE2 to pry open cells. Because these receptors are mainly found deep inside the human lung, patients developed very severe illness that frequently left them too sick to spread SARS to many others; the people most at risk were health care workers who take care of patients. If hCoV-EMC used the same receptor, researchers would have a head start in understanding how it spreads and how to stop it—primarily by protecting health care workers. It might also help them in the development of drugs and vaccines.

To find out, the team engineered baby hamster kidney cells to express the human ACE2 receptor. These cells could be infected with the SARS coronavirus, as expected, but not hCoV-EMC. That finding, supported by additional experiments, led them to conclude that the new coronavirus does not use ACE2 to get in. Which receptor it uses instead is still unclear, which is a “downside” of the new study, says Larry Anderson, an infectious disease specialist at Emory University in Atlanta.

Epidemiologists also want to know which species of animals it is capable of infecting to keep the new coronavirus from spreading further. To determine what types of animals hCoV-EMC can infect, Drosten and colleagues infected cells from humans, pigs, and a wide variety of bats, the key natural reservoirs of coronaviruses. The new virus could infect all of these types of cells. “It’s unusual for a coronavirus to easily go back to bats,” Drosten says. “Most coronaviruses come from bats, but once they jump to other species, you could never get them to reinfect bat cells.” The SARS virus, for instance, originated in Chinese horseshoe bats, but once it ended up in humans, it had changed so much that scientists were unable to infect bat cells with it.

“The fact that [hCoV-EMC] can infect bat cells is consistent with the hypothesis that bats might be the origin of this virus, but this finding doesn’t prove it,” Anderson says. “This virus had to come from an animal source—there’s no other explanation for what’s going on. But we still don’t know what that source is.”

Based on the findings, however, it seems likely that the new coronavirus can infect a wide range of species, Drosten says. That means public health officials may have to start looking for infections and deaths in local wild animal and livestock populations to keep the virus in check, he says.

http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2012/12/new-sars-like-virus-infects-both.html?ref=hp

Besse Cooper, World’s Oldest Person, Dies at 116. 114 year old Iowan Dina Manfredini is new record holder.

On By A.P.In 19th Amendment, 80s, Besse Cooper, centenarian, Dina Manfredini, East Tennessee State University, Georgia, gerontology, Guiness Book of World Records, Iowa, Jeanne Calment, Johnson City’s East Tennessee Normal School, Johnston, junk food, log cabin, Maria Gomes Valentin, Monroe, oldest person in the world, Robert Young, Sidney Cooper, stomach flu, Sullivan County, supercentenarian, Tennessee, Thomas Dewey, World Records1 Comment

Besse Cooper, Paul Cooper

 

The 116-year-old woman believed to be the oldest person in the world passed away yesterday afternoon.

The Associated Press reported that Besse Cooper, a retired Georgia school teacher with a passion for politics, died quietly in her bed at a Monroe, Ga. nursing home about an hour’s drive from Atlanta. Cooper had recently battled stomach flu, but she had reportedly recovered by Monday. On Tuesday, Cooper had her hair set and watched a Christmas movie, but then she experienced breathing problems. She expired at about 2 p.m. after receiving oxygen.

“With her hair fixed it looked like she was ready to go,” Sidney Cooper, Besse Cooper’s 77-year-old son, told the AP.

(MORE: World’s Oldest Dad, 96, Fathers Another Child)

The younger Cooper said his mother was a determined, strong and intelligent individual. CNN reported that just five years after her birth in 1896, Besse Cooper started walking from her family’s Sullivan County, Tenn. log cabin to school in order to make sure one of her brothers got to class. Her time in the classroom developed into a love for school, and she eventually studied education at Johnson City’s East Tennessee Normal School (now East Tennessee State University).

After graduation, she started teaching in Tennessee for $35 an hour, but she moved to Monroe during World War I after her friend informed her she could make more money in the Peach State, according to CNN.

In addition to her appreciation for education, Besse Cooper also developed a fondness for politics. CNN reported she joined the suffrage movement when she was 24, speaking about the importance of having a voice in politics and registering women to vote. After the 19th Amendment granted women the right to vote, she never missed a chance to cast her ballot — except twice (In 2012 and in 1948, when she and her husband — who died in 1963 — believed Thomas Dewey would easily win).

Sidney Cooper told CNN that his mother cherished her 80s most out of the nearly 12 decades she lived. He said she loved to garden, watch the news on TV and read — despite her declining eyesight. But Besse Cooper still had it going on, even during the last years of her life. As an 111-year-old, she impressed Robert Young, Guinness senior consultant for gerontology, with her abilities.

“It’s a sad day for me,” Young told AP of Besse Cooper’s death. “At that age she was doing really well, she was able to read books.”

AP reported the supercentenarian was distinguished as the oldest person on the planet in January 2011. In May of the same year, however, Guinness World Records discovered another woman who was 48 days older, Brazilian Maria Gomes Valentin. After Valentin died the following month, Cooper reclaimed the honor no other Georgian has ever received. She told Guinness in 2012 that her secret to longevity was staying out of others’ business and abstaining from junk food.

Besse Cooper’s death makes 115-year-old Dina Manfredini, who lives in Johnston, Iowa, the new record holder. Only seven other people in history have bested Besse Cooper’s time on this Earth — 116 years and 100 days, according to Guinness. The oldest person ever documented — France’s Jeanne Calment, who passed away in 1997, lived to be 122.
Read more: http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/12/05/besse-cooper-worlds-oldest-person-dies-at-age-116/#ixzz2EDha9BwH

Fecal transplant cures woman’s bacterial infection

On By A.P.In C diff, clostridium difficile, Dr. Goldman, fecal transplant, Georgia, Kaitlin HunterLeave a comment

After surviving a near-fatal car accident, Kaitlin Hunter found herself battling a devastating bacterial infection in her colon that also threatened her life.

The persistent infection was beaten through a little-known technique involving the transplant of fecal matter from Hunter’s mother, which put healthy bacteria back into her colon.

Following the July procedure, “I’ve been so happy,” said Hunter, 20, of Marietta, Georgia. “I’m cured.”

Her struggle began more than a year earlier when she was released from a hospital in Sacramento, California.

A June 2011 car accident fractured her lower spine, lacerated her liver and colon, and broke all 10 toes. Emergency crews used the Jaws of Life to cut Hunter from her dad’s car, and then she was flown to the hospital, where she spent the next month.

Upon her release, Hunter flew home to Georgia. It hadn’t been the summer vacation she imagined, but she thought she was getting better.

But “right when I got off the plane, I went to the hospital. I was having extremely bad stomach pain. A month later, we found out it was C. diff,” Hunter said, using the abbreviation for the bacteria clostridium difficile.

How it began

In the hospital after her accident, doctors followed standard care and put Hunter on antibiotics to prevent an infection.

In spite of the antibiotics — or possibly because of them — C. diff infected her colon, causing severe stomach pain, diarrhea and vomiting.

Hunter, who stands 5 feet 7 inches tall, lost 40 pounds during her struggle. Her weight plummeted to 85 pounds.

It’s believed that antibiotics, which kill harmful infection-causing bacteria, also weaken the beneficial, healthy bacteria percolating in the colon. With the colon’s defenses down, C. diff grows rampant, releasing a toxin and inflaming the colon.

C. diff infections kill about 14,000 people in the United States every year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the number and severity of total cases have increased dramatically over the past decade.

Experts: Alcohol enemas ‘extremely dangerous’

Even though antibiotics put someone at risk of developing a C. diff infection, standard treatment still calls for prescribing more and different antibiotics to kill the C. diff and allow healthy bacteria to recolonize.

But for many people such as Hunter — who went through nine rounds of antibiotic treatments — the healthy bacteria never get the upper hand, and the C. diff just keeps coming back.

‘Brand-new’ treatment

Increasingly, doctors are taking a different approach. Instead of continued assaults on bacteria, “fecal matter transplants” recolonize the colon with new bacteria from a healthy donor.

“This is brand-new for most gastroenterologists,” said Dr. Suku George, Hunter’s treating physician. “We are very excited about this.”

George had never deposited fecal matter by colonoscopy into a patient until Hunter wanted to try it.

Hunter’s mother “donated” one of her stools for the procedure. Next, the hospital lab carefully diluted it, and George pumped the foreign fecal matter right into Hunter’s colon.

The result ended Hunter’s struggle with C. diff.

A study published in March reported a 91% cure rate after just one fecal matter transplant, and a 98% cure rate when combined with an additional round of antibiotics.

Remarkably, that study only included the sickest of patients. All 77 of the study participants already had a recurring C. diff infection, having tried and failed five rounds of antibiotic-only treatments over 11 months, on average.

The study used the colonoscopy method, which many believe is the most effective, because relatively large amounts of fecal matter can be placed deep inside the colon.

Other methods use either an enema or a nasogastric tube, which sends fecal matter through the nasal passage, down the throat and into the stomach.

Why polio hasn’t gone away yet

George tried the nasogastric tube on Hunter, using fecal material from her father, but the C. diff infection returned. He then asked for and received permission to perform the hospital’s first colonoscopic fecal transplant.

Looking ahead

Gastroenterologists pioneering the practice unanimously seem to agree that eventually a cleaner, commercially developed suppository will replace the crude feces and water mixtures currently in use.

“It’ll become a little more acceptable to hospitals and patients and more widely performed,” said Dr. Lawrence Brandt, a professor of medicine and surgery at New York’s Albert Einstein College of Medicine who was the lead author on the March study.”But for people that have recurring C. diff, it doesn’t really much matter, because these patients are so ill and so much want to get better. The fact that it’s stool, it doesn’t matter to them.”

To enroll in a fecal transplant study, visit clinicaltrials.gov.

Thanks to the future Dr. Goldman for bringing this to the attention of the It’s Interesting community.