• A whiff of rosemary gives your brain a boost

    By Andrew Winner

    Could the smell of rosemary enhance your time on a crossword puzzle? It's possible, according to a new study.

    Researchers noted the surprising appearance of a component of rosemary oil in the bloodstream, leading to new ideas about how rosemary aroma can be used therapeutically. The results will be published in Therapeutic Advances in Psychopharmacology, a journal published by SAGE Publications.

    Rosemary has a long history as a traditional remedy with such widespread uses as a hair rinse and a cat repellent. When steamed, some say it can treat bronchitis and other forms of congestion, while the link between rosemary and improved cognitive function has long been established.

    Dr. Mark Moss, who devised and wrote the study, was interested in rosemary’s fragrant aroma, which has long been cherished by chefs and bakers. Could the 1,8-cineole, a constituent part of rosemary oil, be detected in the bloodstream after exposure to just the aroma?

    “We were not surprised by the improvement in cognitive performance following exposure to rosemary aroma as this has been demonstrated previously,” Moss wrote in an e-mail. “What excited us was the demonstration that performance was linked to plasma levels of 1,8-cineole following exposure.” 

    In the study, a cohort of 20 subjects were exposed to varying levels of the aroma, then given a battery of cognitive tests and mood assessments. Not surprisingly, the cognitive performance of the subjects increased, with a corresponding mood increase of lesser magnitude. However, the real surprise came when the blood tests were processed.

    The results showed absorption of 1,8-coneole into the bloodstream, meaning the natural compound was absorbed through the nose and into the blood plasma. For Moss, this means there is a more traditional biochemical explanation for the increased cognitive performances previously demonstrated.

    “This compound is present in rosemary but has not previously been demonstrated to be absorbed into blood plasma in humans,” Moss added. “It is our view that the aroma therefore acts like a therapeutic drug, rather than any effects being a result of the more sensory properties of the aroma.”

    Moss reminds that it’s easy to forget how many of our therapeutic drugs are the result of plant science. His team will continue to investigate the therapeutic benefits of several common plants, including peppermint and lavender. An upcoming study with rosemary will aim to determine whether 1,8-cineole, when ingested orally, can survive the rigors of the gastrointestinal system to be similarly absorbed into the bloodstream. 

    The potential benefits of the research are extremely wide-ranging.

    “Plants are very complex organisms and contain many different active compounds and these vary in concentration from plant to plant and even within the same plant over the course of a day,” Moss notes.  “The accumulation of knowledge regarding possible impacts of plant aromas and extracts could potentially lead to an identification of the best combination to promote specific effects.” 

    “At its grandest conclusion might be the development of plant-based drugs that might extend mental capacity into old age through pharmacological challenge to decline,” Moss concludes. 

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  • Better fuzzy brain cure? Sip some water

    Feeling fuzzy? Reach for a glass of water instead of a cup of coffee.

    By Leah Zerbe
    Rodale.com 

    Severe dehydration can do some pretty crazy things to your mental status, invoking extreme confusion and delirious thoughts. But what happens to your brain when you're just mildly dehydrated—a state that many of us are in every day? To figure this out, researchers conducted a small study of 25 young women, comparing groups that were hydrated to ones that were in need of water.

    In the three-day study, women were dehydrated through three 40-minute treadmill workouts and in a separate treadmill workout after taking a diuretic. In the final test, they worked out on a treadmill but were allowed to properly hydrate during the exercise. During and after each bout of exercise, the women took a series of cognitive tests.

    The researchers combined the results from the exercise-only and exercise-plus-diuretic sessions and compared those results to results from the adequate-hydration session. The average degree of dehydration was a 1.36% decrease in body mass. When the women were dehydrated, they reported less vigor, more fatigue, more mood disturbances, reduced ability to concentrate, increased perception of task difficulty, and greater severity of any headaches both when they were at rest and while exercising.

    Interestingly, the women could not themselves distinguish between being dehydrated and adequately hydrated. While there's not a one-size-fits-all recommendation for how much water to drink daily because different factors like humidity, physical activity levels, altitude, and water content in food play a role, a 2007 Mayo Clinic report found that women who are adequately hydrated take in the equivalent of about 9 cups' worth of beverages a day.

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  • Brain stimulation may improve sense of direction

    By Rachael Rettner
    MyHealthNewsDaily

    One type of memory can be improved by sending electrical pulses into the brain, a new study suggests.

    In the study, patients with epilepsy who were treated with deep brain stimulation showed enhanced spatial memory, the type of memory you need to find your car in a parking lot.

    The study was small — just seven patients — and it's unclear whether the findings would apply to people without epilepsy, or if the technique could improve other types of memory, such as the ability to remember events in your life.

    Still, these early findings suggest deep brain stimulation may improve memory in people with memory impairments, such as those with Alzheimer's disease, the researchers said. More research is needed to see if this is indeed the case.

    The study will be published Feb. 9 in the New England Journal of Medicine.

    Deep brain stimulation has previously been shown to help with symptoms of Parkinson's disease and obsessive compulsive disorder.

    Patients in the new study had previously had electrodes implanted in their brains, to locate the origins of their seizures.

    The patients played a video game in which they drove a taxi though a virtual city and had to pick up and drop off passengers at specific locations. Meanwhile, the researchers stimulated either the hippocampus, which plays a role in forming memories, or the entorhinal cortex, a sort of "doorway" into the hippocampus, through which brain signals must pass before memories are formed.

    The researchers stimulated the brain as the participants learned how to get to some, but not all, of the drop-off locations.

    It turned out, participants better remembered the routes to the drop-off locations when deep brain stimulation had been used. They got there faster, and chose a shorter route to those locations on subsequent trips.

    "They even learned to take shortcuts, reflecting improved spatial memory," said study researcher Dr. Itzhak Fried, a professor of neurosurgery at the University of California, Los Angeles.

    However, only stimulation at the entorhinal cortex, not the hippocampus, had an effect on spatial memory, Fried said.

    "It is possible that with stimulation, we are 'helping' the hippocampus form memories more strongly by manipulating the information that enters the hippocampus," said study researcher Nanthia Suthana, a postdoctoral researcher at UCLA.

    Because the brain stimulation was delivered only while participants were learning, the findings suggest that such stimulation would not need to be continuous in order to improve memory, Fried said. This could mean that a device implanted in the brain could be designed to switch on only at certain times during daily activities, in order to boost memory, Fried said.

    The findings are "highly intriguing," and are in line with the results of some previous animal studies, said Dr. Benjamin Greenberg, a psychiatrist at Brown University and at Butler Hospital in Providence, R.I., who has researched deep brain stimulation but was not involved in the new study.

    However, it's way too soon to say whether the findings with apply to Alzheimer's patients, Greenberg said. And even if deep brain stimulation is found to improve memory in Alzheimer's patients, the effects might be temporary, if they do not counter the brain degeneration that occurs in people with that disease, Greenberg said.

    A 2010 study of continuous deep brain stimulation on six Alzheimer's patients for one year found the therapy improved the use of sugar by the brain, but did not significantly improve memory. The therapy appeared safe, and the researchers said the idea warrants further testing.

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  • Heavy shopping bags weigh on your psyche

    Lisa Poole / AP file

    Heavy bags are a real downer.

    By Linda Carroll

    The charity workers staking out your favorite holiday shopping site with collection cups in hand may have chosen the exact right spot to prick your conscience, a new study suggests.  

    It’s not that you feel guilty for your purchasing power.  It’s about the weight of your shopping bags.

    Researchers found that when we are physically weighed down, with anything from groceries to gifts, our thoughts inescapably turn to serious -- weighty -- subjects.  Apparently, the wiring in our brain sparks directly from physical weight to psychological weight.

    When we’re toting a big haul, we're more likely to be suddenly struck by the importance of current events or issues in the world around us, according to the report published in the Journal of Consumer Behavior.

    “We found that carrying a heavy load leads consumers to feel an unrelated event as being more important and more stressful,” said the study’s lead author Meng Zhang, an assistant professor in the department of marketing at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

    For the new study Zhang ran a series of experiments on more than 100 people to look at the impact of heavy loads on thinking.

    In her experiments, Zhang asked a group of volunteers to carry a shopping bag with bottles of water that weighed about 10 pounds. A comparison group carried bags with empty water bottles. The volunteers were told the experiment was to determine how much weight consumers might be willing to carry while shopping.

    Survey: Are your kids spoiled by the holidays?

    Later, both groups were asked questions, such as how important it is for people to express their opinions in public, how important it was to read nutrition labels, or how important it was that people stay socially connected.

    Sure enough, volunteers carrying the heavy bags tended to score higher on their answers to the societal questions. In other words, people carting around heavy bags were more likely to say lots of stuff was really important.

    Perhaps even more intriguing was Zhang’s discovery that people could be nudged to think about the importance of weighty societal issues just by asking them to read narratives that included words such as “heavy,” “tons,” and “loaded.”

    Is there an antidote to the psychological consequences of carrying a shopping bag loaded down with holiday loot?

    Apparently there is.  In another experiment Zhang determined that the psychological impact of a heavy load could be diminished when people thought about lightweight objects, such as balloons and feathers.      

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  • Carbon monoxide fumes help city dwellers chill out

    Nick Laham / Getty Images file

    Feeling relaxed? We thought so.

    By Cari Nierenberg

    Exhaust fumes may do more than pollute the air -- in very small amounts, they could be relieving stress in city dwellers.

    An Israeli researcher has suggested that breathing in small quantities of carbon monoxide helps relax the frazzled nerves of city folk, making it easier for them to handle the hustle and bustle of urban living.

    A study led by Itzhak Schnell, a professor of geography and human environment at Tel Aviv University, found that low levels of the poisonous gas can have a "narcotic effect" on city residents, says a news release. Although breathing in high levels of this colorless and odorless gas has been described as a "silent killer," extremely low levels of it may act as a "silent calmer," the news release claims.

    This new study appears in the journal Environmental Monitoring and Assessment.

    Schnell and his team tracked 36 young, healthy students who carried micro-sensors as they moved around Tel Aviv, Israel's busiest city. It measured participants' exposure to the typical hassles of city life. Scientists wanted to find out how four environmental stressors -- noise levels, air pollution (carbon monoxide concentrations), crowds and weather (temperature and humidity) -- affected the urbanites aged 20 to 40.

    The sensors captured data from participants in indoor and outdoor locations as they walked along busy streets, rode public transportation or shopped. Measurements were taken over a two-day period in all four seasons. Students also completed questionnaires rating their levels of personal discomfort in their surroundings.

    Researchers found that urbanite's biggest source of environmental stress was noise pollution from other people, mainly human voices. Participants also reported feeling the most stress in shopping malls, open markets and on main streets, likely because of the hordes of other people in these crowded locations.

    According to Schnell, the study's most surprising finding was that participants inhaled much lower levels of carbon monoxide than scientists had predicted. Even though the students took in very low concentrations of the gas, Schnell says it appeared to counteract the stress of the noise and crowds.

    The scientists suggest their findings show that for young, healthy people, the daily grind of city life might have fewer negative consequences on health as they had anticipated. Next, they plan to study how these same pressures of urban living affect more high-risk groups, such as babies, older people, and those with medical conditions like asthma.

    Perhaps taking several deep breaths of polluted city air several times a day isn't that bad an idea, and may turn out to be a new form of urban Zen.

     

     

     

     

     

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  • Placenta pills for postpartum blues: Gross or drug-free treatment?

    By Jane Weaver

    Some new moms are popping pills made from their dried, ground-up placenta as a way to ease postpartum depression, reports NBC's Renee Chenault-Fattah. Some placenta fans believe it also helps with breast milk production and regulates hormones.

    But while there may be nutrients in the placenta, Pennsylvania psychiatrist Dr. Deborah Kim says new moms need to seek a medically proven treatment for something as serious as depression.

    Watch the clip and let us know what you think. Would you try it?

    Some women believe consuming their own placenta can ward off postpartum depression. Psychiatrist Deborah Kim, however, tells WCAU-TV's Renee Chenault-Fattah there is no scientific evidence supporting these claims.

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  • Brain damage makes some blind to the left

    Mehmet Dilsiz / msnbc.com

    By Melissa Dahl

    The patient demanded to know whose left arm was lying in the hospital bed with him. "He would pick it up and throw it out of bed. The arm would come back and hit him in the chest," recalls Dr. Kenneth Heilman, an American Academy of Neurology fellow. Here's the kicker: It was his own arm.

    Sounds like a spooky, post-Halloween tale, but for this particular patient, anything happening on the left -- even the left side of his own body -- might as well not be happening at all. He was experiencing the symptoms of hemispatial neglect, a neuropsychological condition that means the patient is unaware of anything on one side. It's normally the result of damage to the brain's right hemisphere, which results in that lack of awareness of anything left of center. That damage may be due to a stroke (as Heilman's patient had recently suffered), tumor, degenerative disease or traumatic injury. 

    "Right now, you're speaking with me, and until I mention your left foot and your left shoe, were you aware of it at all?" Heilman asked me. "Once I mention it, you could put your attention down to your left foot. But these people have problems attending these things."

    The condition recently featured in the novel "Left Neglected," by neuroscientist-turned-author Lisa Genova, which was published earlier this year. In it, a woman develops hemispatial neglect after a car accident. (Among the character's less-urgent worries: The left side of her chin tends to sprout five little hairs, with annoying regularity. Who's going to get rid of those for her now?)

    Almost all cases of hemispatial neglect affect the left side. That's thought to be because both hemispheres process visual information for the right side, so if damage is done to the left hemisphere, the right can compensate for that loss -- but it doesn't work the other way around.

    The brain's parietal lobe's role in terms of vision is that "it sees two frames of visual information. One form allows you to know what things are. The other form of visual processing lets you know where things are," Heilman explains. The brain combines those two pieces of information with a signal from the cingulate cortex telling you what's important. If those three parts don't mesh together, your brain thinks: Whatever this is, it's not important, so why process what or where it is?

    "Now, in the case of your left foot, that’s normal, because it’s not important," Heilman says. "But let’s say there was some little animal nibbling at your foot -- that would be important. But these people can’t process that."

    The good news: Many patients do get better, after several months of coming up with new ways to draw the patient's awareness to his left visual field. Example: Even in the case of the stroke patient, if someone had pointed to his arm, it would've made him aware of that limb. 

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  • Screwy in the city? Urban living is crazy-making

    Does life in the city sometimes seem a little, well, nuts?

    Come to find out, research shows that urban areas do tend to have a higher incidence of schizophrenia and psychotic disorders than rural areas.

    But why? Is it the stress? The poverty? The drug use? The crime? Is it that guy on the #2 bus who constantly clips his toenails?

    Turns out it might just be a lack of potlucks and social mixers.

    A new study in the Archives of General Psychiatry looked at more than 200,000 people living across Sweden and determined that the culprit is actually increased social fragmentation, i.e., a lack of social networks, social bonds, community spirit, etc.

    “Social fragmentation was the most important area characteristic that explained the increased risk of psychosis in individuals brought up in cities,” wrote Dr. Stanley Zammit, lead author of the study.

    Does that mean that living in cities -- especially cities where people never mix or mingle or make eye contact -- makes us crazy?

    “Our findings suggest that living in certain parts of cities is associated with an increased risk compared to other areas in cities or rural areas but it’s only a small increase,” says the clinical senior lecturer in psychiatric epidemiology at Cardiff University in Wales. “The lifetime risk of schizophrenia is about 1 percent, so lifetime risk of living in a city might go up to about 1.5 percent -- not a big difference.”

    Not a big difference, but coupled with city noise, high costs, increased stress and the occasional break-in, it was enough for Heather Corinna to move to a small Pacific Northwest island after living in Chicago, Minneapolis and Seattle.

    “When I was living in a basement apartment in a crummy neighborhood in Chicago, I kept waking up to find my back door open,” says the 40-year-old sexuality educator. “I thought I was just forgetting to lock it until I woke up in the middle of the night and found the janitor of our building sitting in a chair at the end of the bed watching me sleep. He was probably one of the people in that study.”

    What about your city drives you nuts? Tell us in the comments area.

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