The study is the work of researchers at Baylor College of Medicine (BCM), Houston, Texas, the Texas Children’s Hospital, and University College London, and is published online in the 1st July issue of the journal Pediatrics.

Dr Lane Strathearn, assistant professor of pediatrics at BCM and and a research associate at the college’s Human Neuroimaging Laboratory, said in a statement:

“The relationship between mothers and infants is critical for child development.”

“For whatever reason, in some cases, that relationship doesn’t develop normally. Neglect and abuse can result, with devastating effects on a child’s development,” he added.

For the study, Strathearn and colleagues observed the brains of 28 first-time mothers of babies aged 5 to 10 months with a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner while they looked at photos of facial expressions of their own and other babies. Some of the photos showed the babies happy and smiling, and others showed the babies looking sad or with neutral facial expressions.

Specifically, the researchers measured the fMRI response to each of 6 photo-observing events: (1) own baby happy face; (2) own baby neutral face; (3) own baby sad face; (4) unknown baby happy face; (5) unknown baby neutral face; and (6) unknown baby sad face. The mothers looked at each photo randomly for 2 seconds, and there was a variable 2 to 6 second pause between each photo.

The fMRI scanner measured blood flow in the brain, giving rise to the expression that the brain “lights up” in areas of increased blood flow, which shows where the brain is more active at that time.

The results showed that:

• When the mothers looked at their own baby’s face, certain dopamine-related reward centres in their brains “lit up”.
• The brain areas that appeared to be most affected were the ventral tegmental area and the substantia nigra regions (part of the midbrain reward system); the striatum (involved in reward, cognition, and motor functions); two frontal lobe regions and a primary motor area.
• The two frontal lobe regions that lit up were: (1) the medial prefrontal, anterior cingulate, and insula cortex (involved with emotion processing), and (2) the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (involved in cognition).
• The nigrostriatal brain regions interconnected by dopaminergic neurons, including the substantia nigra and dorsal putamen, lit up when the mothers saw happy, but not neutral or sad photos of their own babies.
• On the whole, the mothers reacted more strongly to their own babies’ faces than to the unknown babies’ faces, with the strongest reactions being to happy faces, then neutral, then sad.

The researchers concluded that when first-time mothers see their own baby’s facial expression it activates an extensive network of brain connections that integrate emotional and cognitive signals and direct them to motor and behavioural outputs.

“Dopaminergic reward-related brain regions are activated specifically in response to happy, but not sad, infant faces,” wrote the researchers, who suggested that:

“Understanding how a mother responds uniquely to her own infant, when smiling or crying, may be the first step in understanding the neural basis of mother-infant attachment.”

Dopamine is a neurotransmitter involved in many brain functions, including motivation, emotion processing, thinking, sleep, mood, attention, learning and motor control.

The researchers said they were surprised that the mothers did not react as strongly to their babies’ sad faces as they did to their smiling faces. They expected to see an equally strong, but perhaps different reaction when mothers saw their babies’ crying faces.

Strathearn said that the brain areas that lit up for the mothers, are the same as the ones that light up in experiments on drug addiction.

“It may be that seeing your own baby’s smiling face is like a ‘natural high’, the strongest activation was with smiling faces,” said Strathearn.

“What’s in a Smile? Maternal Brain Responses to Infant Facial Cues.”
Lane Strathearn, Jian Li, Peter Fonagy, and P. Read Montague
Pediatrics Vol. 122 No. 1 July 2008, pp. 40-51
DOI:10.1542/peds.2007-1566

New research shows that even affluent college students who don’t need resources will still attempt to trade sexual currency for provisions, said Daniel Kruger, research scientist at the University of Michigan School of Public Health.

The exchange of resources for sex—referred to by scientists as nuptial gifts—has occurred throughout history in many species, including humans, Kruger said. The male of the species offers protection and resources to the female and offspring in exchange for reproductive rights. For example, an arranged marriage can be considered a contract to trade resources.

However, the recent findings suggest that such behaviors are hard wired, and persist no matter how much wealth, resources or security that people obtain.

For the study, researchers interviewed 475 U-M undergraduate students to discover if they attempted exchanges in reproductively relevant currencies outside of dating or formally committed relationships, and if they were aware of attempts others tried with them. While the study population was limited to students, these types of exchanges happen all over the world in different cultures and species, he said.

The majority of students were well aware of their own attempts to trade reproductive currency, Kruger said. However, if they were in committed relationships, they did not view the partnership as trading in reproductive currencies, he said.

Overall, the strategy of attempting to exchange investment for sex is only successful about 25 percent of the time, the paper found. Some of the attempted trades included: tickets to the U-M versus Ohio State game; studying assistance; laundry washed; a Louis Vuitton bag; and voice lessons among other things.

Students in the study were 18-26 years old. For exchange attempts made, 27 percent of men and 14 percent of women reported attempts to trade investment for sex, 5 percent of men and 9 percent of women reported attempts to trade sex for investment. Of exchange attempts initiated by others, 14 percent of men and 20 percent of women reported that someone else attempted to trade investment for sex with them, and 8 percent of men and 5 percent of women reported that someone else attempted to trade sex for their investment.

Social integration affects the mental health of non-Western male immigrants in a positive way. For women however, social integration gives an increased risk for mental problems according to a new study from the Norwegian Institute of Public Health (NIPH).

We found that social integration among non-Western immigrants is linked to good mental health in men, but not in women. That was unexpected, says Professor Odd Steffen Dalgard from the Division for Mental Health at the NIPH.

Dalgard is the primary author of the article “Immigration, social integration and mental health in Norway, with focus on gender differences”, published in BioMed Central: Clinical Practice and Epidemiology in Mental Health, where the results of the study are presented.

A possible explanation for the gender differences is that social integration in Western countries challenges traditional female gender roles from non-Western countries to a greater degree than it challenges traditional male gender roles. This can lead to conflict of norms, threatened self-esteem and/or loss of feelings of identity.

In this study non-Western immigrants were defined as women and men born in Eastern Europe, Asia or Africa, whilst Western immigrants were defined as women and men born in Western Europe or America.

18 770 adults took part in Health Studies in Oslo (HUBRO) in 2000-2001 and the NIPH is responsible for maintaining the data. All men, women and youths in Oslo in 11 different age groups were invited to participate in HUBRO, which aimed to get an overview of the Oslo-population’s health and collect research material. The study was a collaboration project between the City of Oslo, the University of Oslo and the predecessor to the current NIPH.

16 000 of the participants answered questions on mental health and their data are included in this study. 1 448 of the participants are immigrants from non-Western countries, whilst 1 059 are immigrants from Western countries.

Psychological problems are measured with ten questions from the Hopkins Symptom Check List (HSCL-10). Social integration is measured by knowledge of the Norwegian language, reading of Norwegian newspapers, visits from ethnic Norwegians, as well as receipt of help from ethnic Norwegians. Information about salaried work, household income, marital status, social support and conflicts in close relationships are also included.

Reference
Odd Steffen Dalgard & Suraj Bahadur Thapa. (2007): Immigration, social integration and mental health in Norway, with focus on gender differences. BioMed Central: Clinical Practice and Epidemiology in Mental Health.

If you are struggling to retrieve a word that you are certain is on the tip of your tongue, or trying to perfect a slapshot that will send your puck flying into a hockey net, or if you keep stumbling over the same sequence of notes on the piano, be warned: you might be unconsciously creating a pattern of failure, a new study reveals.

The research appears in The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology.

Karin Humphreys, assistant professor in McMaster University’s Faculty of Science, and Amy Beth Warriner, an undergraduate student in the Department of Psychology, Neuroscience & Behaviour, suggest that most errors are repeated because the very act of making a mistake, despite receiving correction, constitutes the learning of that mistake.

Humphreys says the research came about as a result of her own experiences of repeatedly getting into a tip-of-the-tongue (or TOT) state on particular words.

“This can be incredibly frustrating – you know you know the word, but you just can’t quite get it,” she said. “And once you have it, it is such a relief that you can’t imagine ever forgetting it again. But then you do. So we began thinking about the mechanisms that might underlie this phenomenon. We realized that it might not be a case of everyone having certain words that are difficult for them to remember, but that by getting into a tip-of-the-tongue state on a particular word once, they actually learn to go into that incorrect state when they try to retrieve the same word again.”

Humphreys and Warriner tested 30 students to see if their subjects could retrieve words after being given a definition. e.g. “What do you call an instrument for performing calculations by sliding beads along rods or grooves” (Answer: abacus). They then had to say whether they knew the answer, didn’t know it, or were in a TOT. If they were in a TOT, they were randomly assigned to spend either 10 or 30 seconds trying to retrieve the answer before finally being shown it. Two days later, subjects were tested on those same words again. One would assume that having been shown the correct word on Day 1 the subject would still remember it on Day 2. Not so. The subjects tended to TOT on the same words as before, and were especially more likely to do so if they had spent a longer time trying to retrieve them The longer time in the error state appears to reinforce that incorrect pattern of brain activation that caused the error.

“It’s akin to spinning one’s tires in the snow: despite your perseverance you’re only digging yourself a deeper rut,” the researchers explained.

There might be a strategy to solve the recurrence of tip-of-the-tongue situations, which is what Warriner is currently working on for her honours thesis.

“If you can find out what the word is as soon as possible – by looking it up, or asking someone – you should actually say it to yourself,” says Humphreys. “It doesn’t need to be out loud, but you should at least say it to yourself. By laying down another procedural memory you can help ameliorate the effects of the error. However, what the research shows is that if you just can’t figure it out, stop trying: you’re just digging yourself in deeper.”

Can we train ourselves to be compassionate? A new study suggests the answer is yes. Cultivating compassion and kindness through meditation affects brain regions that can make a person more empathetic to other peoples’ mental states, say researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Published March 26 in the Public Library of Science One, the study was the first to use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to indicate that positive emotions such as loving-kindness and compassion can be learned in the same way as playing a musical instrument or being proficient in a sport. The scans revealed that brain circuits used to detect emotions and feelings were dramatically changed in subjects who had extensive experience practicing compassion meditation.

The research suggests that individuals – from children who may engage in bullying to people prone to recurring depression – and society in general could benefit from such meditative practices, says study director Richard Davidson, professor of psychiatry and psychology at UW-Madison and an expert on imaging the effects of meditation. Davidson and UW-Madison associate scientist Antoine Lutz were co-principal investigators on the project.

The study was part of the researchers’ ongoing investigations with a group of Tibetan monks and lay practitioners who have practiced meditation for a minimum of 10,000 hours. In this case, Lutz and Davidson worked with 16 monks who have cultivated compassion meditation practices. Sixteen age-matched controls with no previous training were taught the fundamentals of compassion meditation two weeks before the brain scanning took place.

“Many contemplative traditions speak of loving-kindness as the wish for happiness for others and of compassion as the wish to relieve others’ suffering. Loving-kindness and compassion are central to the Dalai Lama’s philosophy and mission,” says Davidson, who has worked extensively with the Tibetan Buddhist leader. “We wanted to see how this voluntary generation of compassion affects the brain systems involved in empathy.”

Various techniques are used in compassion meditation, and the training can take years of practice. The controls in this study were asked first to concentrate on loved ones, wishing them well-being and freedom from suffering. After some training, they then were asked to generate such feelings toward all beings without thinking specifically about anyone.

Each of the 32 subjects was placed in the fMRI scanner at the UW-Madison Waisman Center for Brain Imaging, which Davidson directs, and was asked to either begin compassion meditation or refrain from it. During each state, subjects were exposed to negative and positive human vocalizations designed to evoke empathic responses as well as neutral vocalizations: sounds of a distressed woman, a baby laughing and background restaurant noise.

“We used audio instead of visual challenges so that meditators could keep their eyes slightly open but not focused on any visual stimulus, as is typical of this practice,” explains Lutz.

The scans revealed significant activity in the insula – a region near the frontal portion of the brain that plays a key role in bodily representations of emotion – when the long-term meditators were generating compassion and were exposed to emotional vocalizations. The strength of insula activation was also associated with the intensity of the meditation as assessed by the participants.

“The insula is extremely important in detecting emotions in general and specifically in mapping bodily responses to emotion – such as heart rate and blood pressure – and making that information available to other parts of the brain,” says Davidson, also co-director of the HealthEmotions Research Institute.

Activity also increased in the temporal parietal juncture, particularly the right hemisphere. Studies have implicated this area as important in processing empathy, especially in perceiving the mental and emotional state of others.

“Both of these areas have been linked to emotion sharing and empathy,” Davidson says. “The combination of these two effects, which was much more noticeable in the expert meditators as opposed to the novices, was very powerful.”

The findings support Davidson and Lutz’s working assumption that through training, people can develop skills that promote happiness and compassion.

“People are not just stuck at their respective set points,” he says.

“We can take advantage of our brain’s plasticity and train it to enhance these qualities.”

The capacity to cultivate compassion, which involves regulating thoughts and emotions, may also be useful for preventing depression in people who are susceptible to it, Lutz adds.

“Thinking about other people’s suffering and not just your own helps to put everything in perspective,” he says, adding that learning compassion for oneself is a critical first step in compassion meditation.

The researchers are interested in teaching compassion meditation to youngsters, particularly as they approach adolescence, as a way to prevent bullying, aggression and violence.

“I think this can be one of the tools we use to teach emotional regulation to kids who are at an age where they’re vulnerable to going seriously off track,” Davidson says.

Compassion meditation can be beneficial in promoting more harmonious relationships of all kinds, Davidson adds.

“The world certainly could use a little more kindness and compassion,” he says. “Starting at a local level, the consequences of changing in this way can be directly experienced.”

Lutz and Davidson hope to conduct additional studies to evaluate brain changes that may occur in individuals who cultivate positive emotions through the practice of loving-kindness and compassion over time.

University of Wisconsin-Madison
500 Lincoln Dr., 27 Bascom Hall
Madison, WI 53706
United States
http://www.wisc.edu

A “large and growing” disparity exists between the life expectancies of higher- and lower-income U.S. residents, according to a new federal study, the New York Times reports. For the study, Gopal Singh, a demographer from HHS, and Mohammad Siahpush, a professor at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, used census data for all U.S. counties from 1980 to 2000 to develop an index that measures social and economic conditions.

The study found that, although life expectancies increased for all residents during the two decades, higher-income residents experienced a larger increase than lower-income residents. According to the study, from 1980 to 1982, higher-income residents could expect to live an average of 75.8 years, compared with 73 years for lower-income residents, a difference of 2.8 years. From 1998 to 2000, higher-income residents could expect to live an average of 79.2 years, compared with 74.7 years for lower-income residents, a difference of 4.5 years, the study found. The study also found that the highest-income residents in 1980 lived longer than the lowest-income residents in 2000.

Researchers attributed the disparity in part to:

* More knowledge of advances in medical technology among higher-income residents;

* A larger decrease in smoking rates among higher-income residents;

* Lower rates of health insurance among lower-income residents; and

* Higher rates of unhealthy and risky behaviors among lower-income residents.

Some health care economists said that the disparity will “inevitably widen as doctors make gains in treating the major causes of death,” the Times reports. However, Nancy Krieger, a professor at Harvard School of Public Health, disagreed. She said that from 1966 to 1980, “socioeconomic disparities declined in tandem with a decline in mortality rates,” likely because of the establishment of Medicare and Medicaid, community health centers, the “war on poverty” and the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

Robert Moffit, director of the Center for Health Policy Studies at the Heritage Foundation, said that the disparity might have increased because of a “very significant gap in health literacy” between higher- and lower-income residents.

Congressional Budget Office Director Peter Orszag said, “We have heard a lot about growing income inequality,” adding, “There has been much less attention paid to growing inequality in life expectancy, which is really quite dramatic.”

Disparity for Racial, Ethnic Minorities
The study also highlighted the disparity in the life expectancies of whites and racial and ethnic minorities. According to the study, the largest disparity occurred in the life expectancies of white women and black men. The highest-income white women in 2000 lived an average of 81.1 years, compared with 66.9 years for black men, a 14-year difference, the study found (Pear, New York Times, 3/23).

PBS To Air Report on Effect of Socioeconomic Status on Health
In related news, PBS stations on Thursday will begin airing a four-hour documentary series titled “Unnatural Causes: Is Inequality Making Us Sick,” which highlights the results of studies that examined the effect of socioeconomic status and other factors on health, USA Today reports (Painter, USA Today, 3/24). According to the Native American Times, the series “explores the causes and seeks solutions to America’s health crisis by crisscrossing the country exploring how the social conditions in which Americans are born, live and work profoundly affect health and longevity” (Gray, Native American Times, 3/22).

Christine Herbes-Sommers, one of the filmmakers, said the series aims to demonstrate that “what is written into our bodies is a lifetime of experiences and social conditions. It’s not about genes.” She added that a theme of the series is that not everyone has access to resources that would help them sustain or improve their health (Blumenstock, Washington Post, 3/23).

The colonial curriculum most frequently included Latin, Greek, logic, Hebrew, rhetoric, natural philosophy (physics), mental philosophy (metaphysics), moral philosophy (later separated to include ethics, political science, economics and sociology), and mathematics. No mention of hygiene or health was found in the early college education plans (Rudolph, 1990). Following the American Revolution at the end of the century, new colleges were chartered in many new states including North Carolina, Vermont and Tennessee, with a few offered medical education, but not addressing health beyond the response to disease (Rudolph, 1990).

This century of health education in higher education would see the advent of classes addressing hygiene and health issues. The first college to introduce courses in hygiene was Harvard College in 1818 (Means, 1975). Notable schools including Dartmouth, Williams, Yale, and Amherst would follow Harvard within a few years. While many of these schools would require coursework, not all would offer academic credit toward graduation requirements for this effort (Turner & Hurley, 2002).

In 1824, Thomas Jefferson included a college of anatomy and medicine from the initial designs of the University of Virginia. While this would be an example of early medical education, it did not have a focus on health education as is known today (Rudolph, 1990). Just two years later, Virginia would take a step toward health education with a determination by the Board of Visitors that a Professor of Medicine would be available for thirty minutes, three days a week to assist students with personal health concerns (Turner & Hurley, 2002).

Throughout the later 1800s more colleges added some form of health service, but the focus remained on the physical well-being of students and the only documented health education for students came from those schools who had physical education classes (Turner & Hurley, 2002). Additionally, with the rise of the professional college football coach, the coaches were seen as advocates for “clean-living and high-thinking.” First to be given a professional rank and tenure was Coach Stagg at the University of Chicago (Rudolph, 1990).

At the end of the century, a number of colleges had now included some form of hygiene or health education into the curriculum and a few of these courses were taught by staff from the college health services. By 1895, Cornell University in New York had physical training and hygiene courses that were required yearlong studies, though elective to the main curriculum (Rudolph, 1990). In 1899, Yale University begins to permit undergraduates to take courses in medicine as a part of their studies, where this course of study had previously been limited to professional schools for post-baccalaureate students (Rudolph, 1990).

A major shift in approaches to health education and the coming of modern health education concept would occur in the next one hundred years. This century would see physical education, hygiene and related courses introduced into the college curriculum and when combined with efforts to control communicable diseases would bring the health education side of public health onto college campuses (Grace, 2002). Before the mid-point of the century, the U.S. Department of Labor would recognize Health Education as a specific health service occupation in the Standards Occupation Classification and the end of the century would see the establishment of the National Commission for Health Education Credentialing (Zimmer, 2002).

Meanwhile, the early 1900s also saw parents of college students calling for health education to be offered on campus (Zimmer, 2002).

In 1925, the American Student Health Association created a standing committee on informational hygiene (Boynton, 1971). This is followed two years later by publication of a report from The Presidents’ Committee of Fifty on College Hygiene. In the report, the committee describes objectives that should be a part of a comprehensive student health service including:
5. To discover illogical or defective health attitudes and habits and supply appropriate scientific information and advice for their correction.
7. To teach hygiene by means of the pertinent scientific information and advice given the individual student concerning the nature and importance of his health needs as show by his health examination, consultations, and conferences (Storey, 1927).

These objectives would provide a foundation for the growing need for educating students on health information that they are not receiving from other sources.

In 1936, an international conference on college and university student health services was held in Athens, Greece. During the conference, discussions included “prophylactic means for bettering the health of students,” and conservation of health status (Turner & Hurley, 2002). One year later, in the U.S., a survey of 352 schools yields no information on health education activities in college health, as no questions on the topic were included (Turner & Hurley, 2002).

In 1939, a book titled The Health of College Students is published which acknowledges that educating college students on matters of health is of primary importance. The author discusses how health education has evolved in different departments on college campuses. The book goes on to say “the most important single health problem of college student revolves around their health ignorance. The most fundamental activity of the college health program, therefore, is concerned with the dissemination of sound health information” (Diehl & Shepard, 1939). During this time on U.S. college campuses, members of the hygiene faculty primarily handled health education. The author offered a critique on the health education activities by going on to say, “many colleges are forced to delete or limit hygiene teaching because no member of the faculty is equipped to teach the subject” (Diehl & Shepard, 1939).

One of the landmark surveys of college health would take place in 1953. Doctors Moore and Summerskill would receive responses from 1157 colleges and universities, representing sixty-one percent of higher education institutions in the U.S. at the time. In response to this survey, 200 colleges stated that they had “no responsibility for health of students in any way” (Moore & Summerskill, 1954).
Of the 957 other responding schools, researchers found that eighty percent of schools with a college health service also offered courses in health education, with slightly more than fifty percent of schools requiring a health education course for all students and another twenty-five percent requiring these courses for select majors (usually health-related). A department other than the health services supervised more than sixty percent of the health education activities. In this survey, prevention of disease, a common objective of health education today, is limited to vaccine and immunization issues. Nutrition, now common in college health education programs, was a function of health services at a little over one third of the surveyed schools. From a staffing perspective, a small number of schools acknowledged having a dietician or nutritionist on staff, but otherwise, no mention of health education or health promotion staff can be found (Moore & Summerskill, 1954).

The Fourth National Conference on Health in Colleges (1954) was held and health education is widely discussed. The definition of health education would vary widely during this meeting, with some discussing the idea of health education academic courses and others mentioning health educators as part of the student health staff (Ginsburg, 1955).

In 1957 Millersville State Teachers College in Pennsylvania (later Millersville University) conducted a self-study of the college health program and dedicated an entire chapter to health education. Included in the chapter are standards found on the campus. It should be noted that most of the health education activities discussed in the report were accomplished via classroom-based courses while the study authors do acknowledge activities of “incidental health education” (Pucillo, 1957).

In a book published in 1964, the editor suggests that college health services have assumed the responsibility for health education and preventative medicine in an effort to reduce the need for treatment. The book also claims that institutional health education programs (academic programs) have preceded and are better organized than the college health services. There are discussions within the text that the idea of special hygiene classes given to large groups of students are now “more the exception than the rule,” reflecting a reversal of the early trend in health education on college campuses. They go on to discuss the idea that health programs should be in line with, and facilitate the educational mission of, the institution (Farnsworth, 1964).

Another development of the 1980s was the move to link health education with the academic and life preparation missions of colleges and universities. Leafgren & Elsenrath discussed in 1986 that any effort at health promotion begins with an assessment of the current health status of entering students. The next step is to assist students interested in making progress toward the next level of wellness. “A campus that emphasizes wellness programming for its student body will assist those students in gaining a competitive edge for graduation and successful placement in the business world” (Leafgren & Elsenrath, 1986).

______
Michael P. McNeil, MS
Assistant Director, Alice! Health Promotion
Health Services at Columbia

212-854-5453 phone
mm3117@columbia.edu

Chair, ACHA Health Promotion Section
ACHA Alternate Representative, IATF
Downstate NY Coordinator, The Bacchus Network
??Please consider the environment before printing this e-mail.

Microsoft Outlook Web Access

Snorers have always been the butt of jokes. In cartoons, their nasal roar lifts the roof off houses. In sitcoms, there’s the wife who rolls her eyes at her snoring bedmate. But in reality, it’s not all that funny. In fact, snoring can be a nightmare for snorers and their beleaguered partners, who may wake up several times a night to poke, prod and maybe hoist loved ones onto their sides for a little relief. It’s no wonder that bleary spouses can wake up grumpy and resentful.

But the nightly racket is more than a potential relationship strain. According to the latest research, an increasingly older and heavier population may make this condition an even greater a health risk than we previously thought. For Maggie Moss-Tucker, successful treatment for a longtime snoring problem came almost by accident. One fall morning in 2005, she saw a sign at her local gym seeking snorers as volunteers for a study at Boston’s Brigham & Women’s Hospital. Moss-Tucker, now 56, was intrigued. She had started snoring nearly a decade earlier. “I’d tried everything to stop,” she says, from sleeping upright to using nose strips or a mouth guard. But to her and her husband’s dismay, nothing worked. When she signed up for the study and spent a night at a suburban Boston sleep lab, she found out why.

After reviewing her sleep patterns and oxygen levels, researchers told her that her snoring was actually an indication of something worse. She suffered from sleep apnea, a condition in which patients stop breathing repeatedly as they sleep and can wake up as many as 100 times a night—often without remembering it. That kind of revelation has led to doctors re-evaluating a condition once treated as little more than a nuisance. “In the past, snoring has been treated like a joking matter; you never talked about it with your doctor,” says Dr. David Rapoport, medical director of the Sleep Disorders Center at New York University Medical Center. “But when it becomes very prominent or such that it wakes you up or interferes with breathing, it can be a problem.”

Not everyone who snores regularly has sleep apnea. UCLA pulmonologist Michael Littner, who is certified in sleep medicine by the American Board of Internal Medicine, estimates 50 to 60 percent of those with habitual loud snoring have it. But research is finding that sleep apnea is not the only health condition associated with snoring. The sound occurs when the flow of air from the mouth or nose to the lungs makes tissues in the airway vibrate, usually because of an obstruction or a narrowing of the airway. The more the airway closes or is blocked, the harder the body has to work to push air, which puts pressure on the heart. That’s why, over time, loud snoring can lead to high blood pressure, says Rapoport’s colleague, Joyce Walsleben, past director of the New York University sleep center. “People who are just snorers have higher incidence of stroke and cardiovascular disorders.”

Sleep apnea, in which the airway becomes blocked or, less often, the brain fails to properly control breathing during sleeping, can be viewed as one extreme of the snoring spectrum. Soft or sporadic snoring, which is not generally considered a health hazard, would be at the other end. As the sound and persistence of a patient’s snoring grows, so do the health concerns. A study published in the March 1 issue of the journal Sleep found that loud snorers had a 40 percent greater risk than nonsnorers of suffering from high blood pressure, 34 percent greater odds of having a heart attack and a 67 percent greater chance of having a stroke.

That’s a problem given the number of noisy sleepers out there. In a recent poll by the National Sleep Foundation, about one third of U.S. working adults reported snoring at least a few nights in the previous month. Snoring generally worsens with age so the rate is even higher among the elderly. And, contrary to common perceptions, it’s nearly as common in women as men. Menopause appears to be a factor, as is weight. Being overweight can cause thickness in the airway tube, constricting the flow of oxygen.

Yet many who regularly snore don’t realize that it could be bad for their health. The research linking hypertension, cardiac problems and loud snoring is relatively new. And though awareness of sleep apnea is growing, specialists say the condition is still vastly undertreated. Primary-care physicians don’t routinely ask patients about the quality of their sleep—though that is beginning to change—and few patients think to tell their doctors that they’re snoring, unless it becomes disruptive to their partner. Sleep specialists estimate that between 12 million and 18 million Americans have some form of sleep apnea but many of them, like Moss-Tucker, remain undiagnosed for years. Research from the National Sleep Foundation indicates that only half of those with sleep apnea are being treated. Since it is a progressive condition, says Michael Twery, director of the National Institutes of Health’s National Center on Sleep Disorders Research, “the person who’s affected is usually not aware of how severe the condition is.”

Moss-Tucker remembers being drowsy during the day sometimes, but she blamed it on her busy life. When researchers at the sleep lab asked if she had ever fallen asleep while driving, she laughed initially. But then she recalled long drives during which she’d had to pull over every 45 minutes to take a cat nap to avoid dozing off at the wheel. She’d also become accustomed to taking daily 25-minute naps each afternoon. But once she was diagnosed and began using a Continuous Positive Airway Pressure (or CPAP) machine, the most common treatment for sleep apnea, she says, “My life changed.”

Moss-Tucker no longer needed naps and her energy levels, mental clarity and general moods improved—so much so that she cannot imagine one night without the CPAP, a machine with a mask that attaches to the nose, mouth or both, helping to force oxygen into the airway while the patient sleeps. If it’s used properly, it is nearly 100 percent effective. But CPAPs (or BiPaps, which deliver alternating levels of oxygen), which cost about $500 or more with the mask, can be cumbersome to use and the noise may be as disruptive to sleeping partners as snoring. That can be a major factor in compliance. Despite its efficacy, estimates of overall long-term usage rates remain between 50 to 70 percent.

For snorers who don’t appear to have sleep apnea, there are other measures to avoid bad nights. They include: avoiding big meals and sedating drugs like antihistamines and alcohol before bed; sleeping on one’s side instead of the back; treating conditions like allergies and colds that can cause or worsen snoring, and maintaining a healthy weight.

There are also devices, like the one Moss-Tucker tried without success, which push the lower jaw forward to help keep the airway open. “They are effective in a fair number of snoring cases,” says NYU’s Rapoport, but he cautions that they need to be custom fitted by dentist and can be expensive if not covered by insurance.

Surgery to widen the airways or improve nasal airflow is also an option, though it too may not be covered by insurance and success rates vary. UPPP (or Uvulopalatopharngoplasty), in which a surgeon removes tissue at the back of the throat, can require a hospital stay and a long recovery; it’s typically used for patients with severe obstructive sleep apnea. But other procedures can be performed under local anesthesia in a surgeon’s office, including laser-assisted uvulopalatoplasty (or LAUP), a modification of UPPP in which the surgeon uses a laser to cut the uvula. Patients who get LAUP can generally resume their normal routine almost immediately afterward, but they may require up to five treatments. Somnoplasty is another short office-based procedure; it uses low-power radiofrequency energy that reduces the volume of the soft palate tissue (located at the back of the roof of the mouth) but may require more than one session. Nasal surgery may also be recommended for those with obstructions in the nose. Another treatment is the Pillar procedure, in which three tiny inserts are injected into the soft palate to offer support. Since it’s a newer procedure only approved by the FDA in August 2004, there’s less long-term data. “Studies are showing it does work—but to what extent is not really known yet,” says Rapoport. With several options but no magic bullet, experts say it’s important to have a full medical examination to determine the best course of action. But as long as snoring is seen as more of a joke than a risk,even that step may be too large for some.

Jennifer Barrett and Karen Springen
Newsweek Web Exclusive

By the end of the year it is expected that China’s surfers will number as high as 280 million, a full 30% more than the same time in 2007. The majority of Web browsing purportedly takes place inside Internet cafes; locations which may soon begin being require to register every customer so they can keep track on what each person accesses.

Ken Fisher of Ars Technica points out that China may have the most surfers, but they aren’t seeing as much of the freedom the Internet offers as other countries are. We posted only yesterday that China bans sites such as YouTube for posting content that does not agree with the Communist Party line. President Hu Jintao last year called for there to be efforts made to “purify” the Internet; a plan which seems to be coming well into fruition now. The AFP reports that the Chinese government announced in January that only state-controlled sites will be able to post audio and visual content.

While the number of people accessing the Internet may be increasing, their access to truly free information may be dwindling behind what has been nicknamed “The Great Firewall”. It will be interesting to see how the Chinese handle the influx of Internet-savvy world citizens coming to their country this summer for the Olympics. Will they continue to block all access? Will there be an “island” or confined circle of unrestrained access around the Olympic sites for foreign visitors to utilize? Or will they have to lift the entire wall, even temporarily?

Mashable! – The Social Networking Blog

Today’s video games and online virtual worlds give users the freedom to create characters in the digital domain that look and seem more human than ever before. But despite having your hair, your height, and your hazel eyes, your avatar is still little more than just a pretty face.

A group of researchers from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute is working to change that by engineering characters with the capacity to have beliefs and to reason about the beliefs of others. The characters will be able to predict and manipulate the behavior of even human players, with whom they will directly interact in the real, physical world, according to the team.

At a recent conference on artificial intelligence, the researchers unveiled the “embodiment” of their success to date: “Eddie,” a 4-year-old child in Second Life who can reason about his own beliefs to draw conclusions in a manner that matches human children his age.

“Current avatars in massively multiplayer online worlds – such as Second Life – are directly tethered to a user’s keystrokes and only give the illusion of mentality,” said Selmer Bringsjord, head of Rensselaer’s Cognitive Science Department and leader of the research project. “Truly convincing autonomous synthetic characters must possess memories; believe things, want things, remember things.”

Such characters can only be engineered by coupling logic-based artificial intelligence and computational cognitive modeling techniques with the processing power of a supercomputer, according to Bringsjord.

The principles and techniques that humans deploy in order to understand, predict, and manipulate the behavior of other humans is collectively referred to as a “theory of mind.” Bringsjord’s research group is now starting to engineer part of that theory, which would allow artificial agents to understand, predict, and manipulate the behavior of other agents, in order to be genuine stand-ins for human beings or autonomous intellects in their own right.

The logico-mathematical theory will include rigorous, declarative definitions of all of the concepts central to a theory of the mind, including lying, betrayal, and even evil, according to Bringsjord.

To test “Eddie’s” reasoning powers, the group created a demo in Second Life that subjected their theory to a false-belief test.

In a typical real-life version of this test, a child witnesses a series of events in which Person A places an object (such as a teddy bear) in a certain location (such as a cabinet). Person A then leaves the room, and during his absence Person B moves the object to a new location (such as the refrigerator). The child is then asked to predict where Person A will look for the object when he gets back.

The right answer, of course, is the cabinet, but children age 4 and under will generally say the refrigerator because they haven’t yet formed a theory of the mind of others.

The researchers recreated the same situation in Second Life, using an automated theorem prover coupled with procedures for converting conversational English in Second Life into formal logic, the native language of the prover.

When the code is executed, the software simulates keystrokes in Second Life. This enables control of “Eddie,” who demonstrates an incorrect prediction of where Person A will look for the teddy bear – a response consistent with that of a 4-year old child. But, in an instant, Eddie’s mind can be improved, and if the test is run again, he makes the correct prediction.

A video clip of the “False Belief in Second Life” demonstration is available online at: http://www.cogsci.rpi.edu/research/rair/asc_rca.