Actually, even the people reporting on this study are pretty skeptical. Says PhysOrg:

The study didn't investigate why the increase in one age group was so much higher than the other. It found the percentage of older children diagnosed with ADHD has been rising by 4 percent each year. Some experts say the increase may reflect that doctors are increasingly considering the possibility of ADHD in older kids who have concentration problems - a trend that coincides with the marketing of ADHD medications to teens and adults.

The finding may also reflect the misuse of Ritalin and other ADHD medications in that age group as study aides and recreational stimulants, some experts speculated. "There are people out there being treated for ADHD that probably don't meet the diagnostic criteria," said Scott Kollins, director of Duke University Medical Center's ADHD Program.

So the increased diagnoses may actually just reflect the increasing hunger for Ritalin among people who want a boost. Or it might be a legitimate transformation in human consciousness. You be the judge.

ADHD Increasing Among Older Children [PhysOrg]

A co-author of the study, Christopher Walsh, told Scientific American:

We're showing, on the one hand, that autism seems to have a large genetic component. But, the genes that are involved are actually those that are involved in responding to the environment and learning.

Often, autistic children have problems with the genes that help them learn by forming synapses between neurons in the brain. Either the genes are deleted or dormant.

The Scientific American article continues:

Walsh says the team believes these deletions—which in most cases found here only remove some, but not all, of the DNA that makes up a gene—may mean that the genes can regain some of their normal function. In fact, some of these genes may just be switched off. "This presents the possibility that in some kids we could get the gene going again without necessarily having to put it back in the brain," he says . . . Walsh notes that many children diagnosed with autism tend to show vast improvement when they are placed in environments that allow them to practice learning repetitively. He says that these activities essentially train the neurons to make up for their lost function. "Our work reinforces the importance of early intervention and behavioral therapy," he says. "The more we understand about genetics the more we understand how important the environment is."

This is one of the first studies to offer genetic evidence for the idea that children with autism can actually reformat their brains if placed in the right environment. There has been anecdotal evidence that autistic people can benefit from specialized learning environments, but it was never clear what the genetic basis for these recoveries might be.

Autism Genes that Control Early Learning [via Scientific American]

If you've had cancer, or been diagnosed with cancer, you are eligible to participate. Says the call for volunteers:

Researchers at the Johns Hopkins University are seeking volunteers with a current or past diagnosis of cancer who have some anxiety or are feeling down about their cancer to participate in a scientific study of self-exploration and personal meaning brought about by the entheogen psilocybin, a psychoactive substance found in mushrooms used as a sacrament in some cultures, given in a comfortable, supportive setting. Questionnaires and interviews will be used to assess the effects of the substance on consciousness, mood, and behavior.

Volunteers enrolled in the study will receive careful preparation and 2 sessions in which they will receive psilocybin. Structured guidance will be provided during the session and afterwards to facilitate integration of the experiences. The study complies with FDA regulations.

Volunteer must be between the ages of 21 and 70, have no personal history of severe psychiatric illness, or recent history of alcoholism or drug abuse, have someone willing to pick them up and drive them home at the end of the two psilocybin sessions (around 5:00 PM).

I love science.

If you want to find out more about study, or are interested in volunteering, visit the call for volunteers website.

From the article on We Make Money Not Art:

Revital's scenario imagine that, in the future, a patient suffering from kidney failure would give a blood sample to lab scientists who then isolate in the genome the regions that code for blood production (bone marrow tissues), and immune response (the major histocompatibility complex), extract the genome from the nucleus of a somatic cell taken from a sheep and substitute the corresponding regions of the sheep's genome with the DNA from the patients' genome.

This recombinant DNA is then inserted into the nucleus of a pre-prepared sheep egg cell. After cell division in the egg is initiated, the egg is implanted into a surrogate ewe which will eventually give birth to a transgenic lamb.

During the day, the dialysis sheep roams in the donor patient's back garden, grazes to cleanse its kidneys, and drinks water containing salt minerals, calcium and glucose.

At night, the sheep is placed at the patient's bedside. The transgenic sheep's kidneys are connected via blood lines to the patient's fistula (a surgically enlarged vein). During the night, waste products from the patient's blood are pumped out of the body, filtered through the sheep's kidney and the blood is returned, cleaned, to the patient.

This happens over and over again throughout the night. The day after, the sheep urinates the toxins.

Another of "Life Support"'s projects aims to use greyhounds as artificial lungs for patients who require ventilators to breathe. The device works by strapping a bellows to a retired racing dog (one that would be euthanized anyway) and having it chase a bunny while on a treadmill. As the dog runs, it's increased lung movements pump the bellows, providing air for a human patient.

This sounds cute and all, but how practical is it, really? Greyhounds can't run non-stop, 24 hours a day. What happens when the dog tires out, or needs a little kibble snack? And as for the sheep thing, do you really think PETA is going to let you jam needles into their heads, even if they're transgenic?

Source: Revital Cohen, via We Make Money Not Art via MedGadget

This face is being used by people practicing shoving a nasal endoscope, well, up your nose and down your throat.

Here is a family of obese manikins, which are used for teaching medical professionals how to deal with people whose organs are covered in a bigger layer of fat than the average medical manikin is.

This is by far the saddest and most disturbing of the manikins. This is a geriatric patient manikin, who looks totally miserable. Maybe that's because it has two sets of genitals that you can ram into its body cavity via a huge metal rod. I guess the idea is that when you are elderly, there are no differences between the two sexes other than those interchangeable genitals? That just seems weird to me.

There are a ton more strange and delightful images at Oobject. Top image by Tomer Ganihar.

Medical Manikins [Oobject]

Meow!

Heart Surgery - Open heart surgery hasn't simply improved since 1948. Back then, it wasn't even possible. Before heart and lung bypass machines, doctors cooled the patient with ice (pictured above) to get a few seconds when they could work on the heart without causing death. Now we can repair and even replace entire structures within the heart, or transplant the heart itself.

Reconstructive Surgery - Microsurgery is the key to successfully reconnecting or rebuilding damaged body parts. Joining the tiny blood vessels speeds healing and makes grafts assimilate better. Now we can repair areas damaged by tumors or injuries with skin, muscle and bone from other parts of the body.

Outpatient Surgery - We have become so good at certain procedures that what used to require a two-week hospital stay (and all the expense and discomfort that entails) now doesn't even require an overnight visit. From the point of view of both patients and hospital administrators, the benefit to the bottom line has had a huge impact on medical care.

Cochlear Implants - The lives of people with certain types of deafness have been vastly improved by these devices, which are essentially bionic ears. By sending audio information as electrical signals through the cochlea and into the auditory nerve, a cochlear implant allows someone who may have previously heard very little to make out speech and other sounds in quiet environments.

Specialization - The typical doctor of 1948 was a general practitioner or generalist surgeon who treated a wide variety of medical problems, but was not necessarily an expert in any of them. Today, doctors are branched into fine specialties, allowing for greater expertise and more intense research into certain areas. Many of these advances would not have happened without increased specialization. Image by: National Institutes of Health.

A 60-year revolution in surgery. [BBC News]

Complete with a pistol that sprays skin-healing stem cells (pictured), a tissue-printer that can print human organs, and of course the very famous — and controversial — "pixie dust" derived from pig bladders for regenerating limbs, the newly created Armed Forces Institute for Regenerative Medicine will throw $250 million at new therapies to help patch up of fixing soldiers maimed in battle in Iraq. It's always possible that some of the techs may not work out but with a quarter billion dollars of backing, it's probably just a mater of time until you see "Skin Guns" right next to the Band Aids in your local drugstore aisle. (from: PopSci)

Previous work with antibodies-as-cancer-killing-smart-missiles has involved attaching strong, nasty chemotherapy drugs to the antibodies. That's a good option, but even better would be to not have harsh chemicals circulating in your blood stream in the first place. Using nanotubes and infrared light is a good, pretty safe alternative because IR radiation doesn't damage living tissue. The only drawback is the tumors will need to be less than 1.5 inches deep in the body, about the limit for the radiation's effectiveness.

Source: UT Southwestern Medical Center

Evidently this system is already in practice in Spain, and the organ-harvesting ambulances are only dispatched when a known volunteer donor is in a life-threatening situation, and now a group of NYC doctors led by surgeon Lewis Goldfrank of Bellevue Hospital Center at New York University want to replicate the process. Still, it's not hard to picture the harvesting paramedics looking over the regular EMTs saying "oh man, that looks bad. Don't think he's going to make it..." or carting someone off to be 'redistributed,' only to have the patient protest, "I'm not dead yet," Monty Python-style:

Normally, transplant and organ preservation specialists don't get involved until after a patient has been declared dead. "Declaring someone dead out in the field, when the person is either not decapitated or decomposed ... is a critical decision," said Michael Grodin, a specialist in health law and bio ethics at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine.

"I think it is a bad idea, a counterproductive one," he said. "The public will see it as an ambulance floating around in the city ready to take your body."

The project's goal is to send an ambulance to the scene of an accident and for the paramedics to do what they can to save the victim's life.

But without necessarily telling these paramedics, project administrators will also order a special ambulance in charge of collecting fresh human organs to the accident site. Its personnel will intervene only if the patient dies.

Source: PhysOrg

Sometimes here at io9, we have to stretch a little to fit cool sci-fi buzzwords like "cyborg" or "post-apocalypse" into our science headlines. But sometimes the scientists do it for us. A team of scientists recently grafted vascular smooth muscle cells and epithelial umbilical cells onto a scaffold of poly-urethane, forming flexible artificial veins and arteries. They referred to this as "cyborg engineering." Once they started pumping blood through them, they found the cyborg veins worked better under vascular pressure. They hope to use them in coronary bypass surgeries, in which a vein from another part of the body is used to shunt a vein around a blockage.

Artificial veins are just a first step toward engineering artifical organs. Not only would this give us a near limitless supply of replacement organs (no more dramatic "tricking hospital administrators into allowing a patient onto the donor waiting list" scenes on House), but we could design the organs to be more healthy and perfect than real ones. You could celebrate your 50th birthday with a batch of fresh, young organs. Your cyborg grandpa might live to be 200. Image by: Science Daily.

'Cyborg Engineering' Enables Coronary Bypass Grafting Using Artificial Veins And Arteries. [Science Daily]

The bot is remote-controlled by magnetic field, just like the ones in the bloodstream. To move it up and down through your insides, your doctor will have a hand-held magnetic device about the size of a chocolate bar. Where ever s/he waves the device, the bot follows. The new gadget will be used for studying the insides of the stomach and esophagus mainly, which are usually hard because a device that's swallowed only spends few seconds in those parts of the body. Once in the stomach, it tends to sink to the bottom of the stomach, making imaging tough.

With magnetic control, doctors will be able to keep the camera-bot floating in the esophagus, stomach, or whatever part of the GI tract they want to study. It'll probably feel really strange having a robot wiggling through your esophagus, but it could go a long way towards treating cancers in the stomach and esophagus, not to mention that pesky, heartburn-inducing acid reflux disease.

Source: Eurekalert!

They're publishing the results of their work this week in PNAS. UC Berkeley has the scoop:

[Nicholas] Marini and Rine estimate that the average person has five rare mutant enzymes, and perhaps other not-so-rare variants, that could be improved with vitamin or mineral supplements.

"There are over 600 human enzymes that use vitamins or minerals as cofactors, and this study reports just what we found by studying one of them," Rine said. "What this means is that, even if the odds of an individual having a defect in one gene is low, with 600 genes, we are all likely to have some mutations that limit one or more of our enzymes." . . . All the more reason to poke around in one's genome, Rine said.

"If you don't give people a reason to become interested in their genome and to become comfortable with their personal genomic information, then the benefits of much of the biomedical research, which is indexed to particular genetic states, won't be embraced in a time frame that most people can benefit from," Rine said. "So, my motivation is partly scientific, partly an education project and, in some ways, a partly political project." . . .

This touches on what Rine considers one of the key biomedical questions today. "Now that we have the complete genome sequences of all the common model organisms, including humans, it's obvious that the defining challenge of biology in the 21st century is not what the genes are, but what the variation in the genes does," he said.

What's really exciting about this idea is really that we'll get tailor-made vitamins, nor even that we'll be sequencing our genomes all the time. Actually, what completely has me floored is the idea that all we may need to feel better are good vitamin supplements. You hear a lot about stem cells, gene therapy, and other fancy cures, but rarely does anyone say: You know, you might be less depressed and heal faster if you just took these simple vitamins.

Personal Genome Sequencing May Lead to Personalized Vitamin Supplements [UC Berkeley]

All four families have a few things in common. First, the people with Unertan syndrome are all the products of incestuous marriages. Children of closely-related people often suffer birth defects. Also, the children who walk on all fours are developmentally disabled; some are unable to talk. What shocked the researchers was that the families with quadrupedal members did not share the same kinds of genetic mutations. One of the researchers, Tayfun Ozcelik, gave a talk today at the European Society of Human Genetics about the genetic study. According to a release from the Society:

Although the families lived in isolated villages 200-300 km apart and reported no ancestral relationships, the scientists expected to find a single genetic mutation implicated in the condition. They were surprised to find that this was not the case.

"We carried out genome-wide screening on these families", said Professor Ozcelik, "and found regions of DNA that were shared by all those family members who walk on all fours. However, we were surprised to find that genes on three different chromosomes are responsible for the condition in four different families.

"In families A and D there were mutations in VLDLR on chromosome 9, and in family B the phenotype maps to chromosome 17 to a region that contains at least 157 genes, and we are still looking for the precise mutation. Neither region appears to be implicated for family C."

In all cases, the affected individuals were the offspring of consanguineous marriages, which suggests that if they had married outside the family they would not have had the condition. All of them had significant developmental delay in infancy. "Whereas normal infants make the transition to walking on two legs in a relatively short period", said Professor Ozcelik, "these individuals continued to move on their palms and feet and never walked upright. Although they can stand from a sitting position and maintain this upright position with flexed hips and knees, they virtually never initiate bipedal walking on their own."

It has been suggested in the past that lack of access to medical care exacerbated the effects of an under-developed cerebellum, and that this led to quadrupedality. "Although it may be true that family B lacked proper medical care, families A and D had consistent access to good medical attention, and both families sought a correction of quadrupedality in their affected children", said Professor Ozcelik. "Indeed, an unaffected member of family A is a physician, who has been actively involved in the medical interventions. In addition, the parents in family A also discouraged their affected children from walking on all fours, to no avail. We think that social factors are unlikely to be involved in the development of quadrupedal locomotion."

Along with brain enlargement, speech, and the ability to make tools, upright walking has long been regarded as one of the key traits that have led to modern humans. Professor Ozcelik's team have opened a window on how mutations in VLDLR affect brain development and influence gait in humans.

"It will be interesting to see if the VLDLR gene is involved in other types of cerebellar ataxias. In addition, we hope to identify the defective genes associated with quadrupedal locomotion in families B and C", he says.

All the families do share genetic factors in common, and Ozcelik's team says similar genetic factors are found in a few North American families whose members cannot walk at all.

If it turns out that there are several groups of genes that control for bipedalism, it might be possible to genetically modify people to walk on all fours. It's hard to imagine why anyone would want to do this outside a mad scientist movie. However, many human genes are shared with our quadrupedal mammalian cousins. Perhaps discovery of the bipedal gene could be the first step in helping cats, dogs, and apes to walk upright. Yes, it could be the first key to "uplifting" other species.

Genetic Mutation Linked to Walking on All Fours [Eurekalert]

Iron lungs are no longer manufactured, because there are many more portable devices that can help paralyzed people breathe. Apparently Odell suffered from a spinal deformity from the polio that made an iron lung her only option. Because it was so heavy, she rarely moved. Her family and a series of community volunteers cared for her. She had a mirror over her head that allowed her to meet people's eyes via reflection, and used a voice-operated computer. In addition, she had a breath-controlled TV remote, so she could watch her favorite soaps via a display also mounted over her head. Because she could not live without the iron lung, Odell was a true cyborg — half human, half machine.

When she was created, there were thousands of cyborgs like her, as you can see in this photograph of a hospital filled with people in iron lungs, below.

Tennessee Woman Who Spent Her Life in an Iron Lung Dies [AP]

Scientists say that aging bodies release an enzyme called collagenase that literally eats away at collagen, which in turn makes the skin weak and thin. It sags and becomes easier to bruise or tear. If collagenase could be removed from the body, or the collagen itself rejuvenated, people's skin would stay firm and healthy. There are several possible substances already available that could promote collagen regrowth (you can see one, Restylane, plumping up collagen in the image above).

According to Eurekalert:

The U-M researchers base their conclusions on past studies in which they have explored why certain anti-aging treatments are effective. A 2007 study looked at Restylane, marketed as a dermal filler, and found that injections of the product caused fibroblasts to stretch, promoting new collagen, and also limited the breakdown of collagen.

In another 2007 study, the U-M team tested lotions containing retinol, a form of Vitamin A found in many skin-care products, and found it significantly reduced wrinkles and skin roughness in elderly skin by promoting new collagen. Other U-M studies have shown why some laser treatments work and some less powerful ones do not. Carbon dioxide laser resurfacing is effective because it removes the aging dermis; in the three-week regrowth process, new, young collagen is produced.

Voorhees and his colleagues say they provide needed, independent research on the effectiveness of available and future treatments to counteract skin aging. They have no ties to the manufacturers of products they study.

It sounds like the early twenty-first century may be the first time in human history when you might have no idea how old the person is that you're talking to. With collagen replacement, you might think that you're dating a 25-year-old until she suddenly drops dead of old age.

Why Some Treatments Rescue Aging Skin [Eurekalert]

Imagine if you could use this magnet to shut off the parts of people's brains that allowed them to think logically, or to turn on the reward system so that they felt really great every time they killed somebody for your evil organization. Seriously disturbing stuff.

Writes Roger Highfield, who wrote the article (and stars in the video above):

The first practical demonstration of TMS was made 23 years ago by Prof Anthony Barker at the University of Sheffield.

Since then, it has become a relatively simple, non-invasive, and painless way to interfere with the workings of the brain, though there is a risk of epilepsy.

Many scientists now use it for basic research. Some have used it to induce electrical changes in the brain's temporal lobes, which have been linked with religious belief, because some sufferers of temporal lobe epilepsy seem to experience hallucinations that bear a striking resemblance to mystical experiences of holy figures.

Many doctors believe it has a role in helping a damaged brain to heal.

TMS offers a kinder alternative to electroconvulsive therapy, the treatment of last resort for people with severe depression who do not respond to drugs.

Others have used it to treat severe epilepsy, and there are efforts to use it to quieten the voices heard by schizophrenics and to track nerve development in infants.

A few even believe that it could actually enhance cognitive skills.

DailyTelegraph via Medgadget

Diseases from space

Of course the classic space disease hits earth in The Andromeda Strain, an early-1970s novel written by a then-unknown medical doctor called Michael Crichton. He was so obsessed with making his deadly disease from a meteor into the stuff of hard science fiction that he actually included footnotes to medical journals and other sources to prove that this scenario could happen. A miniseries based on the book is about to hit the airwaves soon, and it's pretty fun and gross so keep your eyes peeled for it. One of the coolest diseases from space was created by award-winning author Octavia Butler in the novel Clay's Ark, about a guy named Clay who returns from space infected with a strange virus. As the virus spreads, a percentage of the population begins to return to a semi-animalistic state, growing a four-legged morphology and being led by instinct to form patriarchal packs of human-hunting creatures. It's a really fascinating look at what would happen if people could not fight their "animalistic" urges to kill and fuck, and had to give into those urges even as they knew they weren't in their best interests. On a lighter note, there is the excellent space disease that comes in a meterorite in one of the short stories in 1980s classic movie Creepshow. Stephen King in a rare movie acting role plays a dim-witted guy in Maine who touches the meterorite and slowly turns into a giant plant creature. Cannot be missed. And then there's the disease that hits the space station in the movie version of Doom, which turns people into creatures who can shoot their tongues. You really don't need to know much more than that, honestly.

Sexually-transmitted diseases

One of the most bizarre episodes on Star Trek: Enterprise was "Stigma," the "psychic AIDS" episode where vulcan hottie T'Pol revealed that she'd been mind-raped by some seriously unsafe dude and it had given her a kind of brain-HIV that was explained with the usual "tech tech tech" panache you know so well from Trek. Not surprisingly, another great scifi sex disease comes from David Cronenberg, whose movie Rabid tells a rather incoherent story about how plastic surgery leads to this sex disease that involves things that live in armpits and poke you. No, really. Although The Hunger is a vampire movie (where Susan Sarandon has sex with Catherine Deneuve, to the collective happiness of people the world over), the flick treats vampirism scientifically — it turns out that this condition (which is transmitted during sex, though maybe it doesn't have to be, but who cares because of the aforementioned hot lesbian sex) involves sciencey things like blood cells and ancient Egyptians. But one of the truly coolest and most disturbing sex diseases is "the bug" in the comic book series Black Hole, by Charles Burns. In the book, hundreds of teenagers who've caught the bug have become mutant stoners living in the woods to escape stigma (ooh, there's that word again) from the non-mutant populace. Excitingly, Black Hole is about to become a movie directed by David "Fight Club" Fincher, with some writing credits going to Neil Gaiman. And if you like MILFs, you've got to see Flesh-Eating Mothers, all about suburban moms who get a bizarre venereal disease that turns them into child-eating freaks.

Diseases of the Superpowered:

You've probably forgotten Anne McCaffrey's novel Crystal Singer, but we haven't. People with perfect pitch go to a planet where crystals for ship engines are mined using special tones that can only be produced by singing (in perfect pitch). Singers who land on the planet hoping to become miners are all stricken with a disease that kills some, but leaves the rest with super-senses and groovy sex lives. Similarly, a disease grants mega-powers in the Powers comic book, and in the novel The Changeling Plague. Then there are the diseases that only affect super-powered people, like the legacy virus in X-Men, which kills only mutants. Then there's the cylon disease in Battlestar Galactica, which spreads via the resurrection process and kills the cylons in a grisly way — it's a nice cross between computer virus and bio-virus. And on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, there was a disease that affected only the mega-powered changelings, making them more and more gooey each time they changed shape until they turned into nothing but yucky liquid.

Diseases that make you a zombie

The most popular scifi disease these days has to be anything that turns people into zombies. There's the disease "Rage" in 28 Days Later, which converts people into fast-moving, drooling, human-eating freaks. And it would seem that pretty much the same disease is attacking people in the remake of I Am Legend that came out a few months ago, though that disease kills a lot of people and leaves only a small percentage of the population as zombies. A government-created disease is what causes Jenna Jameson to become the world's first zombie stripper in Zombie Strippers, and the amazing novel World War Z (soon to be a movie) is a pseudo-documentary tale of what happens to the world when a zombie virus divides the population into killers and killed.

Diseases that reduce the population

If you're sick of VD from space, and zombies seem somehow unrealistic to you, there are always the more realistic scifi diseases that just reduce the population by killing people instead of turning them into mutants or monsters. In Stephen King's classic The Stand, the world has been reduced by a government-created virus. Survivors have to pick sides between a nice old lady who is fighting a mean young man as they try to recreate human civilization (I think there's something about god and the devil in there too, but let's please ignore that). Ursula Le Guin's novel Lathe of Heaven is about what happens when a liberal doctor discovers that his patient can change reality with his dreams. In an effort to create world peace and reduce overpopulation, the doctor tries to direct his patient's dreams, only to find that they come true in a way he didn't expect. Populations are reduced via a virulent plague, and peace breaks out when aliens attack the moon and the tiny group of remaining humans come together against a common enemy. In Connie Willis' awesome time-travel tale The Doomsday Book, a pandemic is reducing the population of London while a young woman travels back to the Middle Ages and lives through a wave of the black death that is ravaging the tiny town she's taken shelter in. Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood's apocalyptic biotech novel, is about a mad scientist who destroys humanity with a plague in his attempt to create a more perfect species that will be free of war and other human problems.

Now who wouldn't want an ambulance dispatch when they have a heart attack, but automatically summoning the authorities whenever your vitals go haywire? There are plenty of reasons that could happen, and most of them are pretty personal. There's also a proposal on the table to have your pill dispenser automatically alert the hospital when you haven't been taking your meds...

This sounds like privacy clusterf—k waiting to happen, but to their credit the folks at OfCom at least appear aware of the issues:

If the "in-body network" recorded that the person had suddenly collapsed, it would send an alert, via a nearby base station at their home, to a surgery or hospital.

However, Ofcom also gave warning in its report, Tomorrow's Wireless World, that the impact of such technology on personal privacy would require more debate.

That 'more debate' is definitely going to need some clarification. Still, in principle it's hard to deny the awesomeness of getting Bluetooth installed in your body.

Oh, and before Dennis Quaid goes and loses it completely, we'd better console him — despite their uber-coolness, the sensors cannot replace you, Dennis. Only you have the power, as the pilot of your miniature vehicle designed for intrabody-exploration, to push a button and rearrange Martin Short or indeed any one else's face to look like The Cowboy's (Pictured).

Source: The Times Online via LiveScience

Image: Firstshowing.net

Together with the recent development of an automatic anesthesia machine, the automated robot surgeon presents an eerie prospect for the operating room of tomorrow: it may be completely uninhabited by people except you, the patient. Perhaps a technician will look on from behind a two-way mirror; perhaps not.

There's a long way to go before that happens. For example, robots will have to learn to adapt to unforeseen complications during surgery. But what would you think if the OR at your local hospital looked more like an assembly line at General Motors and less like a place where people are healed? Would you trust a robot to cut you apart then sew you back up, good as new?

Source: PhysOrg

Image: Medgadget

Led by neuroscientist Bill Deakin of the University of Manchester in the UK, researchers gave 33 healthy men ketamine intravenously and monitored its effects in brain scans once per minute. Activity in the orbitfrontal cortex, which is thought to be responsible for feelings of dread and anxiety, quickly shut down.

As the researchers say, this opens the doors for much better trips — I mean moods, much better MOODS — for people suffering from depression who don't respond to other drugs, like Prozac. It also works within 24 hours, whereas 'zac can take a month.

Source: Reuters

Image: Technology Review

McGill anesthesiologist Thomas M. Hemmerling, who helped develop McSleepy, says:

We have been working on closed-loop systems, where drugs are administered, their effects continuously monitored, and the doses are adjusted accordingly, for the last five years. Think of "McSleepy" as a sort of humanoid anesthesiologist that thinks like an anesthesiologist, analyses biological information and constantly adapts its own behavior, even recognizing monitoring malfunction.

I still can't decide if I'd feel safer or less safe with a robot monitoring my anesthesia. At least it wouldn't fall prey to human error — only to operating system crashes.

McGill News via The Biotech Weblog

Turns out Alan Spievak worked in regenerative medicine, and was familiar with Stephen Badylak's work at the University of Pittsburgh. Toiling in the lab, Badylak figured out that extra cellular matrix from a pig bladder (the stuff leftover when bladder cells are washed away), is chock full of biochemical signals that prevent scarring from stunting cells' regenerative tendencies. But he'd never used it on people, so when Spievak rubbed the powder on the nub of his finger, it was untested. But it worked, and an article on the BBC website has got the video to prove it. The question is: how much of a limb or organ could we one day regrow with the stuff?

From the BBC story:

If they can perfect the technique, it might mean one day they could repair not just a severed finger, but severely burnt skin, or even damaged organs . . . They hope soon to start a clinical trial in Buenos Aires on a woman who has cancer of the oesophagus. The normal procedure in such cases is often deadly. Doctors remove the cancerous portion and try to stretch the stomach lining up to meet the shortened oesophagus. In the trial they will place the extra cellular matrix inside the body from where the portion of oesophagus has been removed, and hope to stimulate the cells around it to re-grow the missing portion.

So could limbs be re-grown? Dr Badylak is cautious, but believes the technology is potentially revolutionary.

"I think that within ten years that we will have strategies that will re-grow the bones, and promote the growth of functional tissue around those bones. And that is a major step towards eventually doing the entire limb."

Source: BBC via PopSci

Image: Daily Mail

A release from the University of Illinois explains:

Erythromycin and newer macrolide antibiotics azithromycin and clarithromycin are often used to treat respiratory tract infections, as well as outbreaks of syphilis, acne and gonorrhea. The drugs can be used by patients allergic to penicillin.

Macrolide antibiotics act upon the ribosomes, the protein-synthesizing factories of the cell. A newly-made protein exits the ribosome through a tunnel that spans the ribosome body. Antibiotics can ward off an infection by attaching to the ribosome and preventing proteins the bacterium needs from moving through the tunnel.

Some bacteria have learned how to sense the presence of the antibiotic in the ribosomal tunnel, and in response, switch on genes that make them resistant to the drug, Mankin said. The phenomenon of inducible antibiotic expression was known decades ago, but the molecular mechanism was unknown.

Mankin and his team of researchers — Nora Vazquez-Laslop, assistant professor in the Center for Pharmaceutical Biotechnology, and undergraduate student Celine Thum — used new biochemical and genetic techniques to work out the details of its operation.

"Combining biochemical data with the knowledge of the structure of the ribosome tunnel, we were able to identify some of the key molecular players involved in the induction mechanism," said Vazquez-Laslop.

"We only researched response to erythromycin-like drugs because the majority of the genetics were already known," she said. "There may be other antibiotics and resistance genes in pathogenic bacteria regulated by this same mechanism. This is just the beginning."

Medgadget has the news:

All of the studies being presented used the Medtronic DBS system to stimulate a target within the brain called the ventral anterior limb of the internal capsule/ventral striatum (VC/VS), which is a central node in the neural circuits that regulate mood and anxiety.

"The data we are presenting on 43 patients is the result of more than 10 years of work across multiple institutions worldwide. These data represent the largest number and the longest evaluation of patients with psychiatric disorders who have undergone DBS implants, including some with long-term follow up," said [Cleveland Clinic neurosurgeon] Dr. Ali Rezai, who represented an international working group of physicians studying DBS therapy for treatment resistant OCD and depression. "While OCD and depression treatment with DBS require additional clinical evaluation research, our early open-label experience to date is encouraging and indicates that DBS may help severely disabled and suffering patients who have exhausted other treatment options."

Deep Brain Stimulation Useful for Severe Depression and OCD [Medgadget]

According to the authors of the study, diabetes and lung disease were the biggest life-shorteners. In an introductory note to their study, PLoS editors write:

The researchers looked at differences in death rates between all counties in US states plus the District of Columbia over four decades, from 1961 to 1999. They obtained the data on number of deaths from the National Center for Health Statistics, and they obtained data on the number of people living in each county from the US Census. The NCHS did not provide death data after 2001. They broke the death rates down by sex and by disease to assess trends over time for women and men, and for different causes of death.

Over these four decades, the researchers found that the overall US life expectancy increased from 67 to 74 years of age for men and from 74 to 80 years for women. Between 1961 and 1983 the death rate fell in both men and women, largely due to reductions in deaths from cardiovascular disease (heart disease and stroke). During this same period, 1961-1983, the differences in death rates among/across different counties fell. However, beginning in the early 1980s the differences in death rates among/across different counties began to increase. The worst-off counties no longer experienced a fall in death rates, and in a substantial number of counties, mortality actually increased, especially for women, a shift that the researchers call "the reversal of fortunes." This stagnation in the worst-off counties was primarily caused by a slowdown or halt in the reduction of deaths from cardiovascular disease coupled with a moderate rise in a number of other diseases, such as lung cancer, chronic lung disease, and diabetes, in both men and women, and a rise in HIV/AIDS and homicide in men. The researchers' key finding, therefore, was that the differences in life expectancy across different counties initially narrowed and then widened.

I love Thompson's description of Pushkagrad, a floating Soviet-style island, whose deets are:

-Rotating agriculture pads with train tracked irrigation systems.
-Towering Administration Department crowned with statue of the First Idealogue.
-740mm rail gun, supplying the namesake of the city as well as granting it the capability of incapacitating and sometimes felling other floating cities in times of war.
-Industrial sector capable of churning out goods both for export as well as internal use within Pushkagrad.
-Heavily patrolled and armed docks for trading and overall market access.

Check out Keith Thompson's Gallery. (Thanks, dosido!)

If not the medical tricorder from Star Trek, when could we possibly see diagnostic equipment capable of scanning for infections, viruses or impending heart attacks, attached to wrist watches or other portable devices?

If you're interested in your EKG or your glucose level, you may have to find a tricorder ringtone for your iPhone. Wearable heart monitors with Bluetooth are well on their way to market. Not only could a doctor remotely monitor a patient using a PocketPC such as the Alive EKG (at left), there's no reason why a patient's bluetooth-enabled cell phone couldn't be used to automatically alert a physician in case of emergency, too.

Impressive as that is, I'm a firm supporter of devices with lasers over devices without lasers. This laser digitizer (below), when attached to a PDA, can be used to record the width and depth of a healing wound - helping doctors and nurses better track patient progress. The PDA, called the ARANZ Medical Silhouette, can then be used to upload measurements and images into a patient file. I challenge anyone to use this device without feeling like you are living in the future.

Not every portable monitoring device needs to be quite so high tech. Patients in rural areas and the third world often do not have physical access to doctors - but for many applications, they might be able to do without. The CellScope (at left) aims to turn an ordinary cell phone camera into a "telemicroscope" capable of sending high-magnification images of skin or blood samples to a doctor for remote diagnosis. An inexpensive alternative to a long trip for a routine diagnosis, and the speed at which the information can reach a physician makes this a potentially valuable tool for keeping real-time track of disease outbreaks.

The gold standard for infectious disease monitoring in patients is usually a blood test for a biomarker molecule of some sort. While we can't yet wave a device over someone and know that much about the contents of their blood, we may be soon be able to miniaturize the equipment necessary to perform the analysis. Electronic noses, for example, may soon be able to diagnose diseases by smell (with a little help from a layer of artificial mucus) - if a dog can be trained to smell cancer on a patient's breath, why not?

Microfluidic lab-on-a-chip technologies (pictured below) can already be used to determine the presence and extent of gum disease by testing for biomarkers present in a few microliters of saliva. Researchers aim to pack everything the device requires into a 5-pound package, and to develop similar chips for other diseases. If you'd like to avoid getting the disease in the first place, real-time infectious disease monitors can be used as an early-warning system, with prototypes currently capable of detecting the presence of the avian flu virus. While there's plenty of tweaking to do before these silicon chip-based sensors are installed in hospital air vents or worn by soldiers in the battlefield, the alternatives to early detection range from a mild fever to coughing up blood - followed by extensive tests to reveal why you have a mild fever or are coughing up blood. Far better to know what's coming so that we can limit exposure and treat the disease as early as possible.

If these possibilities aren't tantalizing enough to interest you in medical miniaturization, keep in mind that Gene Roddenberry inserted a clause into his contract stating that anyone who can build a tricorder can use that name to describe the device. One company has already combined an EMF meter, light and colorimeter, barometer, thermometer, and clock into a tricorder, but the medical version is as of yet unrealized. If you succeed, a warning - reversing the polarity on any of these devices is more likely to bugger its electronics than allow it, like most technologies on Star Trek, to perform impossible feats critical to the plot.

Terry Johnson is a biology researcher at UC Berkeley and io9's resident biogeek. If you have a question you'd like Terry to answer, email him at: tdj@io9.com.

Developed by HIV/AIDS researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, the Positive Choice system helps reduce risky behavior among people living with HIV. Their method is sort of cheating (at least from a techie perspective) because it plays back video of a live-action 'doctor' actor to patients, but it's getting results. Here's what one of the study's authors had to say about their trial, which involved 917 participants at five hospitals around the San Francisco Bay area:

"Our most striking finding was that many of our intervention arm participants eliminated risky behaviors altogether—38 percent who reported unprotected sex at baseline reported no vaginal or anal sex without a condom after the intervention. Forty-four percent who had been using drugs at the first visit had stopped using all drugs at the conclusion of the study," said lead author Paul Gilbert, ScM, senior research associate at UCSF.

It'll still be a while for the technology to catch up (Wagner's system is in no danger of passing a Turing test). But people are getting more and more comfortable interacting with computers every day, so is it too soon to say we'll live to see a day when robots replace psychotherapists?

Source on Positive Choice: PLoS ONE, via EurekAlert

Source on Wagner study: original reporting for this post.

Photo: realtimearts.com

There's still a lot of uncertainty flying around about just how toxic nanomaterials that make their way into air, soil, and water supplies (or whether they're even toxic at all). And the researchers — Virginia Miller and John Lieske, say they're not sure whether these nanoparticles are naturally formed in the body, or if they're picked up from the environment. You can listen to an interview called with them here called "Nanoparticles and Disease." They'll also be heading up a session on nanotech and physiology at the Experimental Biology 2008 conference on Wednesday.

In her work, Miller injected lab animals' artery walls with nanoparticles and the walls became inflamed. Inflammatory response is a first step towards hardening, but clearly a lot more work is going to be needed before the issue of nanotoxicity is laid to rest. Still, would it hurt if Britta started making water filters that we could set to "nano"?

Source: NanoTechWire

Image: 3dscience.com, via ScienceBlog

John Kessler, lead author on the Journal of Neuroscience paper says it'll be at least a few years before you find the gel in your local hospital, and it hasn't been shown to work in humans yet. He plans to submit the gel to the Food and Drug Administration for approval as a pharmaceutical in the not-too-distant future.

Source: Northwestern University via EurekAlert

It's true...going in through the mouth, surgeons have coaxed people to cough up appendices, bile glands, and gall bladders and women have given birth to the same organs as well. Last year, the first "transvaginal nephrectomy" was performed. And doctors in Barcelona announced yesterday that they've done it again.

NOTES surgery is where it's at. By going in through a natural opening in the body, doctors only need to make a small incision in the vaginal wall, or stomach lining. Then they wheedle their way through the abdomen to the offending organ or tissue, snip snip, and they're out in no time. OK, in the first kidney operation, it took about 3 hours. No Biggie.

The best part? You the brave patient are out of the hospital in a day or two, with no visible scarring (though sometimes small external cuts are needed). Docs are understandably excited about this, and hell, why not swallow some laparoscopic surgical tools if it'll cure what ails you? Ladies: if you think you've got it bad because doctors like to exploit your female hardware, rest assured — plans are in the works to use the rectum and male urethra as future entry points.

from EurekAlert

It's worth quoting rather extensively from a release about this study, which makes a somewhat subtle point. First, the researchers explored three different types of mental illness, ranging from mild to severe. They also point out that people in Lebanon on average don't have a higher rate of mental illness than people in other countries. When Lebanese civilians have been directly exposed to war, however, the likelihood that they will develop mental illness increases 3- to 13-fold. (Also, note that the researchers carefully define what "exposure to war" means.)

From a release about the study:

Elie Karam and colleagues . . . used a World Health Organization (WHO) interview tool to diagnose mental health disorders in a sample of 3,000 adults in Lebanon representative of the population. They investigated the question of lifetime prevalence (the proportion of Lebanese who have a mental disorder at some point in their lives) and the age of onset of mental disorders, as well as the delay they experienced in receiving treatment . . . They also asked each participant in the study about their experience of traumatic events relating to war, including whether they had been a refugee (38 % of people in the study), a civilian in a war zone (55%), or witnessed death or injury (18%). Although the relationship between war and the mental health of people serving in the military has been described before, this is the first time that a nationally representative study has assessed the effect of war on the first onset of mental disorders in a civilian population.

The authors describe that one in four Lebanese in this study had a mental health disorder during their lifetime, according to the Diagnostic and Statistic Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV) criteria that the WHO tool uses, with major depression being the most common disorder. This is similar to prevalence of mental illness in the United Kingdom and lies within the range observed in the WHO's World Mental Health Surveys in other countries. The researchers also estimated that one in three Lebanese would have one or more mental disorders by the age of 75, which is also similar to survey results in other countries. Only half the surveyed people with a mental disorder had ever received professional help; of those who did have a mental disorder, the delay in treatment ranged from 6 years for mood disorders to 28 years for anxiety disorders. Finally, exposure to war-related events increased the risk of developing an anxiety, mood, or impulse -control disorder by 6-fold, 3-fold and 13-fold respectively.

Lifetime Prevalence of Mental Disorders in Lebanon [PLoS Medicine]