Brain — Impaired Social Response Reversal. As if there was any question of the role of brain regions, especially in the frontal lobe, in the control of social behavior, the authors present a case of a patient who acquired hallmarks of antisocial personality disorder, or sociopathy, after a right frontal injury.
Daily Archives: 25 May 00
New Scientist: Stress express. I was taught that the link between stress and illness was the negative effect it had on the functioning of various components of the immune system. Now it appears that stress hormone levels may directly facilitate disease-causing pathogens in your body.
New Scientist: It’s not simply antibodies. We know less than we think we do about how vaccines work, and this ignorance is hampering the development of effective AIDS immunization. Once effective vaccines for other diseases have been developed, basic science research on their mechanism of action stops.
A rose by any other name is one step nearer: Presbyterian Church court approves gay ‘holy unions’
Local congregations are permitted to conduct religious ceremonies celebrating gay unions
if it is made clear they are not marriages, according to the highest court of the Presbyterian Church.
There’s something I find particularly outrageous about the killing of war correspondents by combatants. An Associated Press cameraman and a Reuters correspondent were killed in an ambush by rebel forces in Sierra Leone yesterday.
Brain scans of Gulf War veterans show brain damage. As compared to healthy veterans, those who came home from the war sick had loss of brain cells (on a new more sensitive imaging technique called magnetic resonance spectroscopy) of a comparable magnitude to that found in degenerative neurological diseases, although affected areas were different.
“You need to ask yourself if you would be willing
to give up 5 percent to 25 percent of the brain cells in vital parts of your brain that serve as the relay station for all automatic
and subconscious functions of your brain.” Some researchers propose three Gulf War Syndromes with differing symptom patterns that roughly sort out according to etiology. These new MR spectroscopy findings were in veterans complaining of the most debilitating of the syndromes, Type 2, which appears to correlate with low-level nerve gas exposure during the war. Type 2 patients may have genetically lower levels of a blood enzyme that protects against nerve gas damage, thus making them more vulnerable to damage from low levels of nerve gas (something no one knew about when we sent them into battle in Kuwait, of course). In the new study the subjects with the greatest evidence of brain damage were the ones with the lowest levels of the neuroprotective enzyme.
