Animal body worlds

Add this one to my must-see list: Animal Body worlds. Gunther von Hagens, creator of the human version of Body Worlds, has done it again this time using animals in a plastination exhibit opening in Germany. I thoroughly enjoyed the human version - in fact I got to see it twice, both here in the States and while overseas in Ireland - and as an animal and medical enthusiast I really can't wait for this one to start touring the world.

Phar Lap lives again

This is kinda creepy...but kinda cool, in a morbid sort of way:
Dead Horse Lives

In the late 1920s, during the height of the great age of American horse racing, Phar Lap was one of the biggest celebrities with four legs. Winning 37 of his 51 races and becoming renowned throughout his home country of Australia as well as here in America he inspired many people and gave them hope during the difficult times of the Great Depression before dying unexpectedly in 1932. His owner, understandably devastated, decided that while he would send the big horse's heart back to Melbourne  he wanted his hide to be mounted and preserved by a taxidermist.

Now, I don't think I'd like my horse - or any pet for that matter - put back together again no matter how good a taxidermist may be; it's just a little creepy if you ask me. However I have to admit that when I read this old article from a 1932 edition of Popular Science I was a intrigued and while I couldn't imagine having it done today I can definitely appreciate the skillful attention and care that must have gone in to the restoration to bring back to life such a wonderful American icon.

Brain rewiring

As I turned on the TV this morning the Today show was featuring a story about a little girl named Cameron Mott. Cameron was born perfectly healthy but began having serious seizures when she was three and a half years old which increased in severity and frequency to the point where she was having up to 10 seizures a day and had to wear a helmet to protect her head. After many incorrect diagnoses she was eventually diagnosed with Rasmussen's Syndrome, a disease that would have continued to spread throughout her brain destroying cognitive and physical functions along the way and leaving her with a wildly firing set of neurons that would cause seizures for the rest of her life. In 2007 her family made the decision to bring her to John's Hopkins Children's Hospital in Baltimore to undergo a hemispherectomy. In this procedure half of her brain was removed to get rid of the damaged brain tissue while preserving the remaining half. What amazed me was seeing her interview on the Today show and watching videos of her talking, walking, running and playing just like any normal nine-year-old. Within a month of the surgery, which initially left her completely paralyzed on the left side of her body (since they removed the entire right side of her brain), her remaining hemisphere was able to rewire itself to control the left side of her body as well as the right to the point where she was able to walk out of the hospital of her own accord. It simply amazes me not only what the brain can do but how quickly it can rewire to compensate for the missing pieces. I wonder if she is at any higher risk of getting a concussion since she's missing half of her brain. They say the right side of her skull would fill with cerebrospinal fluid to fill the empty space but I wonder if the fact that it is fluid, rather than a solid object, would make it easier for the remaining side of her brain to move around. Anyway, here's the video clip from the Today Show:

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On a cool little side note, the man who invented hemispherectomy that cured this little girl was Dr. Ben Carson, a world-renowned neurosurgeon who also is well known for separating a pair of Siamese twins who were joined at the head. This same Dr. Carson spoke at Lafayette's commencement last year and I got to hear him since I had gone back to watch a few friends graduate (I graduated the year before). He was a very interesting person to listen to and I'm glad I got a chance to hear him speak, especially with me studying neuroscience and all :)

Serotonin and SIDS

A study by Boston Children's Hospital published this week in the Journal of the American Medical Association seems to have found a correlation between serotonin levels and SIDS. Babies who have died of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome appear to have lower than normal levels of serotonin in their brains. Since serotonin regulates many processes within the body, including sleep and wakefulness, a deficiency of this chemical would suggest that these SIDS babies were unable to recognize warning signs and wake themselves up when they entered a situation where oxygen levels were decreased (such as during stomach sleeping when they are more likely to work themselves into a corner or become surrounded by too much fluffy bedding).

Serotonin is a widespread neurotransmitter, contributing to many processes other than sleep including appetite, learning ability and - probably most famously - mood. While there is currently no way to test if a baby has low serotonin levels it makes me wonder how many babies who died of SIDS would  have continued to have serotonin-related issues later in life. Had they survived, would they have been plagued by learning disabilities or depression or would the body have found a way to right itself over time? How many people who suffer from depression now had a serotonin deficiency right from the beginning as an infant and were just lucky enough to escape SIDS?

As tempting as this research is, even if we could test a baby's serotonin levels we likely wouldn't be able to do anything to change the situation medically. Although parents naturally would want a "cure" it is highly unlikely this research would be able to provide one. What could we do? Prescribe antidepressants? Not a healthy choice when you consider the extreme delicacy of an infant brain that is growing and wiring itself together at the fastest rate it ever will, making connections that will last throughout it's life. Considering the side effects that these drugs have in adults alone, the result could be devastating on such a malleable infant brain. Besides, there is rarely "one cause" of any condition and even it is serotonin in this case, this neurotransmitter affects so many other life processes that to alter it in the hopes of solving one problem could cause ten other much more complicated issues. The most we could hope is that parents might be able to receive a SIDS-probability "heads up" in the future, but it is still an interesting find and gives us a bit more insight into this baffling condition.

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Study linking MMR with autism RETRACTED

Breaking medical news today as the Lancet - the medical journal that originally published the 1998 study linking the MMR vaccine with autism - retracted the paper and accepted the claims as false. While the reason for retraction was the study's unethical conduction of research (conflict of interest, non-randomized participants, etc.), this points to flaws within the experimental design itself which are likely to have influenced the results. The possibility of unethical experimental techniques and confounded results becomes even more likely when we realize that funding for the study came from families who believed their children were harmed in some way by the MMR vaccine. All in all, we can not say for sure that the results of this study held any truth or not, but most doctors today do not support the link between MMR and autism. Additionally, to have a study retracted from public record is a very rare occurrence and is only done if there is a great amount of evidence against it.

The VisualMD

This is a great video clip highlighting Alexander Tsiaras and his work creating beautiful educational videos and interactives from real medical data. Beginning with a New York based company called Anatomical Travelogue, Tsiaras now has branched off and created TheVisualMD, an online database of interactives and articles for the medical education of the general public. He has also published several books, two of which live on my reference shelf: The Invision Guide to a Healthy Heart and The Invision Guide to Lifeblood. The images are really beautiful and I especially love how he takes real photographs and superimposes actual medical data on top to show relationships between the internal body and what you see happening on the outside.  Everything he uses is from real data; nothing is made up or the consequence of artistic license. Here are just a few examples of some of his work:

www.hurriyetusa,com 

Alexander Tsiaras, Anatomical Travelogue and TheVisualMD

Alexander Tsiaras, Anatomical Travelogue 

And for an interesting comparison, take a look at this modern image by Alexander Tsiaras (from his book "The Architecture and Design of Man and Woman") constrasted with a piece done in 1774 by Jan van Rymsdyk entitled "The Anatomy of a Human Gravid Uterus":

,
 

www.medgadget.com (Tsiaras)

National Library of Medicine (Rymsdyk)

  

www.medgadget.com 

Alexander Tsiaras, from"The Architecture and Design of Man and Woman"

Smart parasites

Last week Fox's hit edge-of-real-science show Fringe featured a virus that was able to manipulate its host's behavior to ensure it's own survival and dispersal among other individuals. For example, the virus was able to realize when it was being contained and could "think" it's way out of the quarantine by directing it's host to jump out of a window or kill other individuals in an attempt to escape into the outside world. This seemed a little far-fetched at the time, but today I discovered that it really isn't all that far from the truth....

Robert Sapolsky, a professor and biological researcher from Stanford University, has studied many different aspects of neuroscience and the body's response to stress for the past 25 years or so and in this interview goes in to detail about real life parasites that are capable of controlling their host's behavior to a remarkable degree. Maybe they can't make anyone jump off tall buildings but Toxoplasma, for example, which found only n the gut of a cat and in their feces is able to cause rats to suddenly not only ignore their innate fear of the smell of a cat but to actually be attracted to it. Quite an interesting interview. Even though it is a little long, it is worth setting aside 30 min of your day to listen to this guy talk.

As a side note, I saw him speak about "why zebras don't get ulcers" when he came to Lafayette a few years ago. He is an amazing and entertaining public speaker and really seems to do research for the love of discovering new and cool things. In his own words: "I love science, and it pains me to think that so many are terrified of the subject or feel that choosing science means you cannot also choose compassion, or the arts, or be awed by nature. Science is not meant to cure us of mystery, but to reinvent and reinvigorate it."

Mona Lisa

Leonardo DaVinci is one of my favorite men in history and I am continually amazed at his contributions and achievements in science and art. The Mona Lisa, perhaps one of his most famous pieces, has been the subject of countless investigations and debates over the years and still remains the center of many unanswered questions. However, one question about her peculiarly enigmatic smile has recently been put to rest: Why does she appear to smile one moment but then that smile fades as soon as you try to examine it up close? Scientists from the Institute of Neuroscience in Alicante, Spain have looked closely into this phenomenon and arrived at a conclusion we all should have expected (after all, this is Leonardo we are talking about): it's science!

When Leonardo painted the image of Mona Lisa, he deliberated painted the edges of her smile in a slightly blurred method known as sfumato while leaving the rest of her mouth in sharp focus. The end result is meant to play with our eyes and the differences between our peripheral vision and central vision within the retina. While the retina allows us to focus directly on objects of interest and thus see them in very high detail, our peripheral vision developed as a way for us to take a general scope of our surroundings. Able to pick up slight movements and changes in our environment as well as general shapes, peripheral vision alerts our brain as to where we should look next but doesn't provide any great focusing ability. By painting the center of Mona Lisa's mouth in clear detail but leaving the edges fuzzy, Leonardo effectively prevents us from seeing the smile when we view the face head on (using our central retinal vision) but allows it to sneak back in when we focus on some other aspect of the piece thus allowing our peripheral vision to take over. Pretty sneaky Leo....

It's too bad that I'm not a professional neuroscientist. These findings were just presented in October of last year at the Society for Neuroscience's annual meeting in Chicago, and it would have been interesting to go. Click here for more information.

Eye tests and Alzheimer's

According to a new study by scientists at the University College London, retinal cells may be able to offer an early peek at Alzheimer's disease. Since the retina is a direct extension of the brain these scientists believe that by visualizing dying cells in the retina they may be able to extrapolate what's going on in terms of cell death within the brain. It is an interesting idea, although I'm curious to see what happens once human trials start later this year. Since Alzheimer's doesn't affect the same area of the brain in every individual I wonder how accurate it will be. Also, what about people with conditions like macular degeneration, a common eye disease causing retinal cell death in individuals over 50? If the dyes in this new test for Alzheimer's target dead and dying cells in the retina, couldn't this lead to false positives especially since many older people who would be at risk of Alzheimer's also tend to have retinal degeneration as a result of their age?