New Cancer Therapy "Dissolves" Woman's Tumor In 3 Weeks

by Justine Alford

In medicine, there is often the concern that a patient will not respond to a particular treatment, but in a turn for the books, physicians are now worried that a new cancer treatment might be so effective at eliminating tumors that it does more harm than good.

After receiving a single treatment of a novel combination therapy, a woman’s tumor seemingly “dissolved” from her chest in just three weeks, leaving her with a gaping hole in its place. The patient received the same cocktail of skin cancer drugs as almost 150 individuals enrolled in a clinical trial designed to test whether one of the therapies worked better on its own or when combined with another. While most patients did significantly better on the combination therapy, researchers were left gobsmacked by this woman’s rapid and dramatic response and have consequently described her case in the New England Journal of Medicine, alongside the trial results.

The therapies the scientists were investigating were the FDA-approved melanoma drugsYervoy (ipilimumab) and Opdivo (nivolumab), which are both antibodies. The former works by interfering with a molecule that can switch off a type of cancer-fighting immune cell called a T-cell, whereas the latter blocks a pathway that can lead to the death of T-cells. Although they act in different ways, both drugs ultimately stimulate the immune system to fight cancer cells.

For the trial, 142 patients with melanoma that had spread to other parts of the body, or metastasized, were randomly assigned either Yervoy plus a placebo or Yervoy in combination with Opdivo. They found that, overall, patients in the combination group fared significantly better than those receiving Yervoy and the placebo. Fifty-three percent of these patients experienced at least 80% tumor shrinkage, and melanoma became undetectable in 22% by the end of the study—a remarkable response for stage IV cancer. None of the patients in the Yervoy monotherapy group achieved this outcome.

Although the trial is now over, it has been extended so that some advanced melanoma patients can still access the combination treatment, which is how the woman described earlier managed to receive the treatment, Live Science reports. According to the case report, the 49-year-old had undergone both surgery and chemotherapy to treat melanoma over a period of four years. Although she had several tumors removed, the disease was persistent and five months ago she developed a large mass under her left breast, which was presumed to have spread from the primary melanoma on her back.

She was given a single dose of the new combination therapy, but when she returned for her second just three weeks later, she reported that her tumor had “disappeared.” Alongside the obvious hole in her chest, CT scans confirmed that the large tumor had been completely eradicated. While such a rapid and dramatic response may sound desirable, the researchers have expressed concerns since if this were to happen to a tumor elsewhere in the body, such as the bowel or heart, it could have grave consequences.

“It is ironic that we are now concerned about the possibility of overly vigorous antimelanoma responses,” the researchers write.

http://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/new-cancer-therapy-dissolves-womans-tumor-3-weeks

5 Signs Humans Are Still Evolving

Jessica Hullinger

When we think of human evolution, our minds wander back to the thousands of years it took natural selection to produce the modern-day man. But are we still changing as a species, even today? New research suggests that, despite modern technology and industrialization, humans continue to evolve. "It is a common misunderstanding that evolution took place a long time ago, and that to understand ourselves we must look back to the hunter-gatherer days of humans," says Dr. Virpi Lummaa from the University of Sheffield's department of animal and plant sciences.

But not only are we still evolving, we're doing so even faster than before. In the last 10,000 years, the pace of our evolution has sped up 100 times, creating more mutations in our genes, and more natural selections from those mutations. Here are some clues that show humans are continuing to evolve.

1. We Drink Milk

Historically, the gene that regulated a human's ability to digest lactose shut down as they were weaned off of their mother's breast milk. But when we began domesticating cows, sheep and goats, being able to drink milk became a nutritionally advantageous quality, and people with the genetic mutation that allowed them to digest lactose were better able to propagate their genes.

A 2006 study suggests this tolerance for lactose was still developing as early as 3,000 years ago in East Africa. That genetic mutation for digesting milk is now carried by more than 95 percent of Northern European descendants.

2. We're Losing Our Wisdom Teeth

Our ancestors had much bigger jaws than we do, which helped them chew a tough diet of roots, nuts and leaves. And what meat they ate they tore apart with their teeth, all of which led to worn down chompers that needed replacing. Enter the wisdom teeth: A third set of molars is believed to be the evolutionary answer to accomodate our ancestors' eating habits.

Today, we have utensils to cut our food. Our meals are softer and easier to chew, and our jaws are much smaller as a result, which is why wisdom teeth are often impacted when they come in — there just isn't room for them. Like the appendix, wisdom teeth have become vestigial organs. One estimate says 35 percent of the population is born without wisdom teeth, and some say they will disappear altogether.

3. We're Resisting Diseases

Doctor image via Shutterstock

In 2007, a group of researchers looking for signs of recent evolution uncovered 1,800 genes that have only become prevalent in humans in the last 40,000 years, many of which are devoted to fighting infectious diseases like malaria. More than a dozen new genetic variants for fighting malaria are spreading rapidly among Africans. Another study found that natural selection has favored city-dwellers. Living in cities has produced a genetic variant that allows us to be more resistant to diseases like tuberculosis and leprosy. "This seems to be an elegant example of evolution in action," says Dr. Ian Barnes from the School of Biological Sciences at Royal Holloway. "It flags up the importance of a very recent aspect of our evolution as a species, the development of cities as a selective force."

4. Our Brains Are Shrinking

Brain scan image via Shutterstock

While we may like to believe our big brains make us smarter than the rest of the animal world, our brains have actually been shrinking over the last 30,000 years. The average volume of the human brain has decreased from 1,500 cubic centimeters to 1,350 cubic centimeters, which is equivalent to a chunk the size of a tennis ball.

There are several different conclusions as to why this is: One group of researchers suspects our shrinking brains mean we are in fact getting dumber. Historically, brain size decreased as societies became larger and more complex, suggesting that the safety net of modern society negated the correlation between intelligence and survival. But another, more encouraging theory says our brains are shrinking not because we're getting dumber, but because smaller brains are more efficient. This theory suggests that, as they shrink, our brains are being rewired to work faster but take up less room. There's also a theory that smaller brains are an evolutionary advantage because they make us less aggressive beings, allowing us to work together to solve problems, rather than tear each other to shreds.

5. We Have Blue Eyes

Blue eyes image via Shutterstock

Originally, we all had brown eyes. But about 10,000 years ago, someone who lived near the Black Sea developed a genetic mutation that turned brown eyes blue. While the reason blue eyes have persisted remains a bit of a mystery, one theory is that they act as a sort of paternity test. “There is strong evolutionary pressure for a man not to invest his paternal resources in another man’s child,” says the lead author of a study on the development of our baby blues. Because it is virtually impossible for two blue-eyed mates to create a brown-eyed baby, our blue-eyed male ancestors may have sought out blue-eyed mates as a way of ensuring fidelity. This would partially explain why, in a recent study, blue-eyed men rated blue-eyed women as more attractive compared to brown-eyed women, whereas females and brown-eyed men expressed no preference.

www.mentalfloss.com/article/30795/5-signs-humans-are-still-evolving

Official Healthy Food Guide Hasn’t Changed In 20 Years: Five Things That Need Updating

 by Kremlin Wickram

The Eatwell plate is the UK government’s official food guide about which foods we should eat to achieve a healthy diet. It is essentially a pie-chart depicting the recommended intakes of five specified food groups: fruit and vegetables, dairy products, cereals, meat and processed foods. It was first published 20 years ago – and despite some two decades of nutritional research has not been changed since.

In some countries – notably Australia, the US and Brazil – the official food guide is revised on a regular basis. Some two decades since it was first published, Public Health England has announced that it will revise the Eatwell plate in the light of proposed new recommendations on sugar from the government’s Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition.

Then and Now

The types of food we eat and the challenges for a healthy diet have changed significantly over the past 20 years. In particular we now know that added sugar is much more harmful to our health than we thought back then. We are now much less convinced that fruit juice – consumption of which is 15 times that in the 1970s – is much healthier than sugary soft drinks. And the need to cut down on red meat in our diets has become clearer, as has our need to reduce saturated fat intake rather than total fat intake
.






Many people have rightly argued that the Eatwell plate is now out of date and some recent government publications, such as the new standards for school food published earlier this year, have not referred to it at all. Now is the opportunity to undertake a fully comprehensive review and here are some issues for Public Health England to consider.

What to Take Account Of

1. We need to redefine the food groups on the Eatwell plate. As Susan Jebb, the government’s adviser on obesity, also agrees: fruit juice should not be included in the fruit and vegetable group (and potatoes should be).
2. Healthier and less healthy foods within food groups should be identified. At the moment the cereals group includes salty and sugary breakfast cereals. We think that the guide should make it clear that, while current levels of cereal intake should be maintained, there are some cereals that are healthier than others.
3. The angles of the segments of the plate – showing how much of the five food groups we should eat – also needs to change. Over the last 20 years a reduction in red meat consumption has been recommended by most public health experts. But the guide doesn’t reflect this. The angle for the meat group needs to be made smaller.
4. A perennial and growing criticism of the guide is that – unlike its US equivalent – it gives a place to unhealthy processed foods and even depicts a can of cola. Cola (or other sugary drinks) should be replaced with a glass of water.
5. Some of the foods shown in the old guide have a greater impact on the environment than others. In particular, most of the foods in the meat group have higher associated greenhouse gas emissions than foods in other groups. Then there are less obvious issues such as air miles. Asparagus is shown in the guide but asparagus air freighted to the UK from South America, for example, will have a higher environmental impact than British carrots. One idea might be to design the plate in such a way that more sustainable food items can be found closer to the centre and unsustainable food items closer to the outer layer of the plate. So as you go from centre to outer circle within a group, the environmental burden of the food item increases.

How green is your asparagus? Goosegrease, CC BY-SA

Today we are not just concerned about our diets for health reasons; there are various other considerations that shape our choices, such as environmental sustainability in food production, animal welfare and Fair Trade – and the Eatwell plate needs to take account of these wider concerns. The guide already takes account of practicalities, for example it sensibly only shows foods that are readily available. But we now know that the ways in which we consume our food not only affects our health but that of the planet and therefore the health of future generations. It is unforgivable to ignore this fact when providing dietary advice.
All of these things need to be taken into account when revising things such as the angles of the segments and how and where in the guide foods are depicted. The World Wildlife Fund has produced its own version of the Eatwell plate called the Livewell plate, which shows how this can be done.
Much has been discovered and published during the past 20 years which has changed our understanding of food. Revision of the Eatwell plate – merely to take account of one government report – seems illogical. This rare opportunity should be used to develop a systematic and transparent approach to reviewing current evidence and to undertake a comprehensive review of the Eatwell plate to reflect all of the dietary challenges we face today.

 http://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/official-healthy-food-guide-hasn-t-changed-20-years-five-things-need-updating

A gut microbe that stops food allergies

By Jennifer Couzin-Frankel 

A class of bacteria commonly found in the guts of people—and rodents—appears to keep mice safe from food allergies, a study suggests. The same bacteria are among those reduced by antibiotic use in early childhood. The research fits neatly into an emerging paradigm that helps explain a recent alarming increase in food allergies and other conditions, such as obesity and autoimmune disease, and hints at strategies to reverse the trend.

Food allergies have increased about 50% in children since 1997. There are various theories explaining why. One is that the 21st century lifestyle, which includes a diet very different from our ancestors’, lots of antibiotic use, and even a rise in cesarean section deliveries, has profoundly changed the makeup of microbes in the gut of many people in developed countries. For example, the average child in the United States has taken three courses of antibiotics by the time he or she is 2 years old, says Martin Blaser, an infectious disease specialist and microbiologist at New York University in New York City. (See here for more on the reach of microbiome research these days.)

Cathryn Nagler, an immunologist at the University of Chicago in Illinois, has spent years probing links between the immune system, intestinal bacteria, and the onset of allergies. Back in 2004, she and her colleagues reported that wiping out gut bacteria in mice led to food allergies. Since then, Nagler has continued trying to understand which bacteria offer allergy protection and how they accomplish that.

In one of the latest efforts, Nagler’s team first confirmed that mice given antibiotics early in life were far more susceptible to peanut sensitization, a model of human peanut allergy. Then, they introduced a solution containing Clostridia, a common class of bacteria that’s naturally found in the mammalian gut, into the rodents’ mouths and stomachs. The animals’ food allergen sensitization disappeared, the team reports online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. When the scientists instead introduced another common kind of healthy bacteria, called Bacteroides, into similarly allergy-prone mice, they didn’t see the same effect. Studying the rodents more carefully, the researchers determined that Clostridia were having a surprising effect on the mouse gut: Acting through certain immune cells, the bacteria helped keep peanut proteins that can cause allergic reactions out of the bloodstream. “The bacteria are maintaining the integrity of the [intestinal] barrier,” Nagler says.

The research “opens up new territory,” Blaser says. It “extends the frontier of how the microbiome is involved” in immune responses and the roles played by specific bacteria. (Blaser’s group reported earlier this month in Cell that giving mice penicillin soon after birth changed their gut microbiome and made them much more likely to be obese as adults.) Nagler and her university have filed for a patent application on the new findings. The ultimate goal is to “interrupt [the allergy] process by manipulating the microbiota,” she says—a probiotic consisting of Clostridia could be a new allergy therapy, for example. Nagler knows of none on the market yet, and they would need testing in people before becoming a treatment of choice.

Posted in Biology, Health The Microbes That Make Us
http://news.sciencemag.org/biology/2014/08/gut-microbe-stops-food-allergies

Dangerous Chemical Leaking Into Food, Raising Blood Pressure

The chemical used to make plastic bottles and canned goods may play a role in raising blood pressure and increasing the risk of heart disease. It’s hardly the first report pointing to the dangers of consuming BPA, or bisphenol-A.

Previous studies have shown that constant, long-term exposure to BPA can affect sexual development and result in brain impairment. Now, a new study carried out by researchers at Seoul National University College of Medicine in South Korea shows that it can also lead to a visible increase in blood pressure.

The researchers, who recently published their findings in the journal Hypertension, asked 60 participants to drink soy milk from either a BPA-lined can or a BPA-free glass bottle. The scientists then examined the participants’ blood pressure and vital signs and took urine samples.

The researchers found that people who drank from BPA-lined cans had 16 times more BPA in their urine than people who drank the milk from glass bottles. Yun-Chul Hong, a physician and one of the study’s co-authors, says this is evidence that BPA can leak from packaging into food.

The researchers also found that those people who drank from the BPA-lined cans had higher blood pressure readings than people who drank from BPA-free glass bottles. Hong says this is an alarming finding “because hypertension, or elevated blood pressure, is a well-known risk factor for heart disease.” Taking things a step further, Hong suggests that “BPA exposure may increase risk of heart disease.”

Laura Vandenberg, a health expert based at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, says these findings are very alarming. “I must say, I was surprised to see that exposures to beverages containing BPA would have a measurable effect on a health outcome like blood pressure,” notes Vandenberg, who says the study “should definitely be repeated with a broader group of volunteers.”

http://www.activebeat.com/health-news/dangerous-chemical-leaking-into-food-raising-blood-pressure/

Research Reveals How Sugar CAUSES Cancer

By Sayer Ji

The average American consumes their body weight annually in this cancer-causing substance, and yet hospitals freely feed it to their cancer patients, oblivious to the harm it does.

Hospitals feed cancer patients sugar and high carbohydrate diets for a reason: they are abysmally ignorant of the role of nutrition in health and disease -- hence their burgeoning growth and packed rooms.

Even though the science itself shows – at least since the mid-20's with Otto Warburg's cancer hypothesis -- that tumors prefer to utilize sugar fermentation to produce energy rather than the much more efficient oxygen-based phosphorylation* – hospitals have actually invited corporations like McDonald's to move into their facilities  to 'enhance' their patient's gustatory experience, presumably to provide comfort and take the edge off of the painful surgery, radiation and chemo treatments erroneously proffered to them as the only reasonable 'standard of care.'

But the times are changing, with new research requiring these medical institutions to reform their dietary strategies, at least if they wish to claim that their interventions are in fact 'evidence-based' ...

New Study Reveals Sugar Doesn't Just Feed But Causes Cancer

A groundbreaking new study, uncovered by one of our volunteer researchers at Greenmedinfo – Jonathan Middleton – is the first of its kind to identify sugar, not only as  fuel source for an already existing cancer, but as a primary driver in oncogenesis – i.e. the initiation of cancerous characteristics (phenotype) within previously healthy cells.

Published in the Journal of Cliinical Investigation and titled, Increased sugar uptake promotes oncogenesis via EPAC/RAP1 and O-GlcNAc pathways, researchers addressed a common perception (or misperception) in the cancer research community regarding sugar's relationship to cancer: namely, "increased glycolysis [sugar based metabolis] is frequently viewed as a consequence of oncogenic events that drive malignant cell growth and survival."

Contrary to this conventional view, the new study "provide[s] evidence that increased glycolytic activation itself can be an oncogenic event..."  That is to say, the activation of sugar-based metabolism in a cell – driven by both the presence of increased quantities of glucose and the increase glucose receptors on the cell membrane surface (i.e. "overexpression of a glucose transporter") – drives cancer initiation.

Moreover, the study found that "Conversely, forced reduction of glucose uptake by breast cancer cells led to phenotypic reversion." In other words, interfering with sugar availability and uptake to the cell causes the cancer cell to REVERSE towards its pre-cancer structure-function (phenotype).

What Are The Implications of This Research to the Diet?

What this new research indicates is that sugar – of which Americans consume an astounding 160 lbs annually (imagine: 31 five-pound bags for each of us!) – is one of the primary causes of metabolic cell changes in the body consistent with the initiation and promotion of cancer. And, the research indicates that removing it from the diet, and depriving the cells of it, could REVERSE cancer

Hidden Sugar, Crouching Cancer

It has been estimated by the USDA that the average American consumes 200 lbs of grain products annually. Why is this relevant to the question of sugar in the diet? Because refined carbohydrate products – e.g. crackers, bread, pasta, cereal – are actually 'hidden' forms of sugar. In fact, puffed rice causes your blood to become sweeter (and presumably feeds more cancer cells sugar) than white sugar, as it is higher on the glycemic index. Adding the two figures together – annual per capita consumption of sugar and grain-based products – we get a jaw dropping 360 lbs of sugar (both overt (table sugar/high fructose corn syrup) and covert (grain carbs) annually – all of which may contribute to promoting the ideal metabolic situation of cancer cells: aerobic glycolysis.

This is one reason why the ketogenic diet – that is, a fat- and protein-focused diet devoid of carbohydrate, both in simple (sugar) and complex (grain product) form – has been found so useful in the most aggressive of cancers: including brain cancer. Once you 'pull the rug out' from under the sugar/carb-craving cancer cells, they are forced to either undergo programmed cell death (apoptosis) or re-differentiate back into non-cancerous phenotypes.

If It's So Bad For Us, Why Do We Eat So Much?

One of the primary reasons why we eat sugar and carbohydrate rich diets is because they are addictive. Within minutes of consuming sugar/carbs our body goes through a neuroendocrine roller coaster. Your brain can not survive very long without glucose, the fundamental energy unit of the cell, and will 'freak out' if deprived of a steady stream of this 'nutrient' within only 2-3 minutes. The endocrine system, on the other hand, perceives the danger of high sugar – namely, glycation associated damage to protein and lipid structures within the cells of our body; think: blood caramelizing, getting sticky, and gumming up the finely tuned works – and will release hormones such as insulin, adrenaline and cortisol, in order to try to get the elevated sugar in the blood and tissues under control. Insulin forces the sugar into storage within the cell, both as glycogen and as fat, but often does its job too well, causing available glucose levels in the brain to be depleted – setting off a vicious cycle of 'emergency signals' telling the body to release more cortisol and adrenaline to increase the levels of glucose in the blood. This, of course, will result in additional insulin production and release, causing the same cycle to be repeated over and over again.

This seemingly endless vicious cycle is responsible for the insatiable cravings a high carb/sugar diet generates – not to mention the fructose-based hedonic effects generated in the brain that modulate both opioid and dopamine receptors in the nervous system (not unlike alcohol), and the pharmacologically active peptides in many gluten-containing grains, which also drive addictive behaviors and an almost psychotic fixation on getting carbs at each meal.

No wonder we have an epidemic of cancer in a world where the Westernized diet prevails. Certainly, we do not mean to indicate that a sugar/carb-rich diet is the only cause of cancer. There are many other factors that contribute to cancer initiation and promotion, such as:

• Chemical exposure
• Radiation exposure
• Chronic stress that suppresses the immune system
• Vaccines containing hidden retroviruses and cancer causing viruses
• Natural infection with bacteria and viruses that are cancer causing
• Lack of sleep
• Insufficient nutrients (lack of methyl donors such as B12, folate, and B6 will prevent the body from 'turning off' (methylating) cancer-promoting genes

Even though cancer is a complex, multi-factorial phenomena, with variables we can not always control, one thing we can do is control what goes into our mouth. Sugar, for instance, does not belong there if we truly want to prevent and/or treat cancer.  And don't forget, carbohydrates that don't taste sweet on the front end – bread, crackers, cereal – certainly convert to sugar in the body within minutes post-consumption.

In a nutshell, if you are concerned about cancer, have cancer, or would like to prevent recurrence, removing sugar and excess carbohydrates is a must. Not only is it common sense, but it is now validated by experimental research.

 *Note: Cancer cells prefer to ferment sugar as a form of energy even when there is sufficient oxygen available to the cells to do so; hence Warburg's description of cancer metabolism as 'aerobic glycolysis' or the so-called 'Warburg effect'.

http://www.greenmedinfo.com/blog/research-reveals-how-sugar-causes-cancer

This is your brain on music

By Elizabeth Landau

Whether you are rocking out to Macklemore & Ryan Lewis in your car or reading with Bach in your bedroom, music has a special ability to pump us up or calm us down.

Scientists are still trying to figure out what's going on in our brains when we listen to music and how it produces such potent effects on the psyche.

"We're using music to better understand brain function in general," said Daniel Levitin, a prominent psychologist who studies the neuroscience of music at McGill University in Montreal.

Three studies published this month explore how the brain responds to music. The quest to dissect exactly what chemical processes occur when we put our headphones on is far from over, but scientists have come across some clues.

Health benefits of music

Listening to music feels good, but can that translate into physiological benefit? Levitin and colleagues published a meta-analysis of 400 studies in the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences, suggesting the answer is yes.

In one study reviewed, researchers studied patients who were about to undergo surgery. Participants were randomly assigned to either listen to music or take anti-anxiety drugs. Scientists tracked patient's ratings of their own anxiety, as well as the levels of the stress hormone cortisol.

The results: The patients who listened to music had less anxiety and lower cortisol than people who took drugs. Levitin cautioned that this is only one study, and more research needs to be done to confirm the results, but it points toward a powerful medicinal use for music.

"The promise here is that music is arguably less expensive than drugs, and it's easier on the body and it doesn't have side effects," Levitin said.

Levitin and colleagues also highlighted evidence that music is associated with immunoglobin A, an antibody linked to immunity, as well as higher counts of cells that fight germs and bacteria.

What music we like

So music is good for us, but how do we judge what music is pleasurable? A study published in the journal Science suggests that patterns of brain activity can indicate whether a person likes what he or she is hearing.

Valorie Salimpoor, a researcher at the Rotman Research Institute in Toronto and former Levitin student, led a study in which participants listened to 60 excerpts of music they had never heard before while in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine.

The 19 participants were asked to indicate how much money they would spend on a given song when listening to the excerpts, while also allowing researchers to analyze patterns of brain activity through the fMRI. Such a small number of participants is common in an fMRI study for reasons of complexity and cost, although it suggests more research should be done.

The study authors highlight in their results a brain area called the nucleus accumbens, which is involved in forming expectations.

"There is actually a network of activity that predicts whether or not you're going to buy this music as you're listening to the music," Salimpoor said.

The more activity in the nucleus accumbens, the more money people said they were willing to spend on any particular song in the "auction" set-up that the researchers designed.

"This was an indicator that some sort of reward-related expectations were met or surpassed," she said.

Another brain area called the superior temporal gyrus is intimately involved in the experience of music, and its connection to the nucleus accumbens is important, she said. The genres of music that a person listens to over a lifetime impact how the superior temporal gyrus is formed.

The superior temporal gyrus alone doesn't predict whether a person likes a given piece of music, but it's involved in storing templates from what you've heard before. For instance, a person who has heard a lot of jazz before is more likely to appreciate a given piece of jazz music than someone with a lot less experience.

"The brain kind of works like a music recommendation system," Salimpoor said.

You can listen to the clips that the researchers used in the study here.

Levitin called the findings "interesting," but views it as a refinement of what other laboratories have found in the past. He and Vinod Menon at Stanford University were the first to show the role of the nucleus accumbens in music in 2005.

Are we all hearing the same thing?

It seems intuitive that different people, based on their personalities, preferences and personal histories of listening to particular music, will have different experiences when exposed to a particular piece of music. Their attention to various details will vary and they might like different things about it.

But Levitin and his collaborators showed in a European Journal of Neuroscience study that, from the perspective of the brain, there may be more similarities among music listeners than you think.

"Despite our idiosyncrasies in listening, the brain experiences music in a very consistent fashion across subjects," said Daniel Abrams, lead author and postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University School of Medicine.

Seventeen participants who had little or no music training took part in this study which, like Salimpoor's, is small, but typical for an fMRI study. Participants listened to four symphonies by composer William Boyce of the late Baroque period, which the researchers chose because they reflect Western music but were likely to be unfamiliar to subjects.

Among participants, the researchers found synchronization inseveral key brain areas, and similar brain activity patterns in different people who listen to the same music. This suggests that the participants not only perceive the music the same way, but, despite whatever personal differences they brought to the table, there's a level on which they share a common experience.

Brain regions involved in movement, attention, planning and memory consistently showed activation when participants listened to music -- these are structures that don't have to do with auditory processing itself. This means that when we experience of music, a lot of other things are going on beyond merely processing sound, Abrams said.

One resulting theory is that these brain areas are involved in holding particular parts of a song, such as the melody, in the mind while the rest of the piece of music plays on, Abrams said.

The results also reflect the power of music to unite people, Levitin said.

"It's not our natural tendency to thrust ourselves into a crowd of 20,000 people, but for a Muse concert or a Radiohead concert we'll do it," Levitin said. "There's this unifying force that comes from the music, and we don't get that from other things."

Further research might compare how individuals with healthy brains differ in their musical listening compared to people with autism or other brain disorders, Abrams said.

"The methods that we've used can be applied to understand how the brain tracks auditory information over time," Abrams said.

What's next

The next frontier in the neuroscience of music is to look more carefully at which chemicals in the brain are involved in music listening and performing, Levitin said, and in which parts of the brain are they active.

Any given neurochemical can have different function depending on its area of the brain, he said. For instance, dopamine helps increase attention in the frontal lobes, but in the limbic system it is associated with pleasure.

By using music as a window into the function of a healthy brain, researchers may gain insights into a slew of neurological and psychiatric problems, he said.

"Knowing better how the brain is organized, how it functions, what chemical messengers are working and how they're working -- that will allow us to formulate treatments for people with brain injury, or to combat diseases or disorders or even psychiatric problems," Levitin said.

http://edition.cnn.com/2013/04/15/health/brain-music-research/index.html?iid=article_sidebar

Fart smells have health benefits, according to Exeter University

Exeter University

The smell of flatulence has secret health benefits - and could help stave off cancer, strokes, heart attacks and dementia, scientists have revealed.

Hydrogen sulfide is one of a number of potent smelly gases produced by bacteria as it breaks down food in the gut.

It is toxic in large doses but in tiny amounts it helps protect cells and fight illness, according to boffins at Exeter University.

When cells become stressed by disease they try to draw in enzymes to generate their own minute quantities of hydrogen sulfide.

The chemical helps to preserve mitochondria, which drive energy production in blood vessel cells and regulate inflammation, and without it the cell can switch off and die.

Researchers have thus come up with a new compound named AP39 to assist the body in producing just the right amount of hydrogen sulfide that it needs.

They believe it will help prevent or reverse mitochondrial damage, which is a key strategy in treating conditions such as stroke, heart failure, diabetes, arthritis, dementia and ageing.

Professor Matt Whiteman from University of Exeter's medical school said: "When cells become stressed by disease, they draw in enzymes to generate minute quantities of hydrogen sulfide.

"This keeps the mitochondria ticking over and allows cells to live. If this doesn't happen, the cells die and lose the ability to regulate survival and control inflammation.

"We have exploited this natural process by making a compound, called AP39, which slowly delivers very small amounts of this gas specifically to the mitochondria.

"Our results indicate that if stressed cells are treated with AP39, mitochondria are protected and cells stay alive."

Before it can be tested on humans, researchers have run disease models to see how effective AP39 is.

Early results show that it can help up to 80 percent more mitochondria survive highly destructive conditions such as cardiovascular disease.

Fellow researcher Dr. Mark Wood added: "Although hydrogen sulfide is well known as a pungent, foul-smelling gas in rotten eggs and flatulence, it is naturally produced in the body and could in fact be a healthcare hero with significant implications for future therapies for a variety of diseases."

The study was published in the journal Medicinal Chemistry Communications.

http://www.westerndailypress.co.uk/Fart-smells-health-benefits-according-Exeter/story-21447028-detail/story.html