BreakThrough Digest Medical News |
| Neuroscience just got faster, cheaper and easier Posted: 29 Aug 2012 09:00 PM PDT Richard Gershon has a shiny new toolbox for neuroscientists that will revolutionize their clinical research by making it radically faster, cheaper and more accurate. It also will help researchers recruit children and adults for studies because participation will be much less time consuming.
On Sept. 10 and 11, Gershon will introduce the new NIH Toolbox to hundreds of researchers at a special National Institutes of Health (NIH) conference in Bethesda, Maryland. At the end of September, he will give away the tools for free to NIH researchers. Gershon, an associate professor of medical social sciences at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, has led an ambitious six-year NIH-funded study reflecting the efforts of 235 scientists around the world that provides the first common measurements for neurological and behavioral health. Currently, one researcher’s test to measure depression, for example, isn’t the same as another’s, so their study results aren’t comparable. Research is built on others’ findings so this hodgepodge mires progress. The 44 new tests — available in Spanish and English — slash the number of questions and time required for study participants by up to 90 percent. The tests also are royalty-free (other tests often have expensive royalties that hike the cost of research) and can be administered by anyone with a basic college education, a less expensive alternative to the Ph.D. level-person with specialized training now required to administer them. An intelligence test that normally takes three hours is whipped off 30 in minutes with the new NIH Toolbox version. Many traditional “gold standard” tests are trimmed from 30 items to five. Every new test was validated to make sure it yields comparable or better results than the longer ones. Many of the streamlined tests are accomplished through computer adaptive testing ?- Gershon’s expertise. In this approach, the computer is constantly adjusting the questions to meet the level of the person being tested, eliminating lots of extraneous questions. “With the computer we cut to what we need to measure in each individual person,” Gershon said. “We zero in on that person’s individual level of functioning and don’t waste their time asking questions far above or below their ability.” Scientists collected data from more than 20,000 participants to determine the difficulty level of every item and validate those items against “gold standard” measures. This is how it works. In a vocabulary test administered to a third grader, the first item will be third grade level. If the student gets that correct, the next one will be 3.5 level and so forth until the computer has zeroed in on the student’s precise ability level. The test only has 20 vocabulary questions compared to the traditional 50 items, but the shorter test is more reliable because half the items on the traditional test would be below the student’s ability and half would be above it. The shortened tests will aid a longitudinal study like the 100,000-subject National Children’s Study, which can spend only so much time testing each child. “Even if we can only test a child for one hour every year we now can administer up to 20 tests during that hour and accurately track his or her development,” Gershon said. The new tests also are the first to measure a continuum of health from dysfunction through superfunction in neurological and behavioral health for persons ages 3 to 85. Most existing tests were developed to measure dysfunction A benefit of the continuum is being able to identify — in longitudinal studies, epidemiological studies and clinical trials — where problems begin to emerge and what the causes may be. To develop norms for the continuum, researchers measured a sample of 5,000 people in English and Spanish of various races and ethnicities of every age in 10 different data collection sites around the country. Gershon tapped the top scientists in the country in each domain to develop the new tests. For the olfaction measure, eight top researchers conferred to examine the worldwide inventory of smell tests and eventually designed their own. The NIH version costs $2 a person (to pay for the scratch and sniff cards) compared to the gold standard tests, which are available for $15 to $30. In addition to smell, some of the measures include multiple areas of cognition, emotional health and motor and sensory functioning such as vision and hearing. More than 30 Northwestern scientists and staff members were involved in the NIH Toolbox including David Cella, chair of medical social sciences, and senior researchers Sandra Weintraub, William Rymer, Nina Kraus and Steve Zecker. ### This project is supported by federal funds from the Blueprint for Neuroscience Research and the Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research, National Institutes of Health, under Contract No. HHS-N-260-2006-00007-C. Contact: Marla Paul |
| ‘Hulk’ protein, Grb10, controls muscle growth Posted: 29 Aug 2012 09:00 PM PDT
Scientists have moved closer toward helping people grow big, strong muscles without needing to hit the weight room. Australian researchers have found that by blocking the function of a protein called Grb10 while mice were in the womb, they were considerably stronger and more muscular than their normal counterparts. This discovery appears in the September 2012 issue of The FASEB Journal. Outside of aesthetics, this study has important implications for a wide range of conditions that are worsened by, or cause muscle wasting, such as injury, muscular dystrophy, Type 2 diabetes, and problems produced by muscle inflammation.
“By identifying a novel mechanism regulating muscle development, our work has revealed potential new strategies to increase muscle mass,” said Lowenna J. Holt, Ph.D., a study author from the Diabetes and Obesity Research Program at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research in Sydney, Australia. “Ultimately, this might improve treatment of muscle wasting conditions, as well as metabolic disorders such as Type 2 diabetes.” To make this discovery, Holt and colleagues compared two groups of mice. Once group had disruption of the Grb10 gene, and were very muscular. The other group, where the Grb10 gene was functional, had normal muscles. Researchers examined the properties of the muscles in both adult and newborn mice and discovered that the alterations caused by loss of Grb10 function had mainly occurred during prenatal development. These results provide insight into how Grb10 works, suggesting that it may be possible to alter muscle growth and facilitate healing, as the processes involved in muscle regeneration and repair are similar to those for the initial formation of muscle. “Don’t turn in your gym membership just yet,” said Gerald Weissmann, M.D., Editor-in-Chief of The FASEB Journal. “If you want big muscles, the classic prescription still applies: lift heavy things, eat and sleep right, and have your hormones checked. But this study shows that when we understand the basic science of how muscle fibers grow and multiply, we will be able to lift the burden ? literally ? of muscle disease for many of our patients.” ### Receive monthly highlights from The FASEB Journal by e-mail. Sign up at http://www.faseb.org/fjupdate.aspx. The FASEB Journal is published by the Federation of the American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB) and is among the most cited biology journals worldwide according to the Institute for Scientific Information. In 2010, the journal was recognized by the Special Libraries Association as one of the top 100 most influential biomedical journals of the past century. FASEB is composed of 26 societies with more than 100,000 members, making it the largest coalition of biomedical research associations in the United States. Celebrating 100 Years of Advancing the Life Sciences in 2012, FASEB is rededicating its efforts to advance health and well-being by promoting progress and education in biological and biomedical sciences through service to our member societies and collaborative advocacy. Details: Lowenna J. Holt, Nigel Turner, Nancy Mokbel, Sophie Trefely, Timo Kanzleiter, Warren Kaplan, Christopher J. Ormandy, Roger J. Daly, and Gregory J. Cooney. Grb10 regulates the development of fiber number in skeletal muscle. FASEB J September 2012 26:3658-3669; doi:10.1096/fj.11-199349 ; http://www.fasebj.org/content/26/9/3658.abstract Contact: Cody Mooneyhan |
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