Some Brain Injuries May Reduce Likelihood of Post-Traumatic Stress

A new study of combat-exposed Vietnam War veterans shows that those with injuries to certain parts of the brain were less likely to develop post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The findings, from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Naval Medical Center, suggest that drugs or pacemaker-like devices aimed at dampening activity in these brain regions might be effective treatments for PTSD.

PTSD involves the persistent reliving of a traumatic experience through nightmares and flashbacks that may seem real. Twenty percent to 30 percent of Vietnam vets (more than 1 million) have been diagnosed with PTSD, and a similar rate has been reported among Hurricane Katrina survivors in New Orleans. Public health officials are currently tracking the disorder among soldiers returning from Iraq. Yet, while war and natural disasters tend to call the greatest attention to PTSD, it's estimated that millions of Americans suffer from it as a result of assault, rape, child abuse, car accidents, and other traumatic events.

Previous studies have shown that PTSD is associated with changes in brain activity, but those studies couldn't determine whether the changes were contributing to the disorder or merely occurring because of it.

Jordan Grafman, a senior investigator at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), part of NIH, turned to the Vietnam Head Injury Study (VHIS) to make that distinction. The VHIS is a registry of Vietnam veterans who sustained penetrating brain injuries (which are less common in Iraq compared to concussion brain injuries). It has received support from the Department of Defense, the Department of Veterans of Affairs and NIH, and is currently supported by NINDS.

"If we could show that lesions in a specific brain region eliminated PTSD, we knew we could say that the region is critical to developing the disorder," says Grafman. The results of his study appear online in Nature Neuroscience.

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Reprogramming The Debate: Stem-cell Finding Alters Ethical Controversy

When University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers succeeded in reprogramming skin cells to behave like embryonic stem cells, they also began to redefine the political and ethical dynamics of the stem-cell debate, a leading bioethicist says. R. Alta Charo, a UW-Madison professor of law and bioethics, says the scientific finding could have far-reaching effects on the social dimensions of the ongoing controversy over embryonic stem cell research.

"This is a method for creating a stem cell line without ever having to work through, at any stage, an entity that is a viable embryo," Charo says. "Therefore, you manage to avoid many of those debates with the right-to life community."

The research alters the debates surrounding both human embryonic stem cell research and somatic cell nuclear transfer cloning. For ordinary embryonic stem cell research, it offers a means of obtaining pluripotent cell lines from a non-embryonic source. For cloning research, it offers a means to make customized, pluripotent cell lines without having to create an intermediate embryo that is a "clone" of an adult person, she says.

Charo says the discovery could remove objections from critics on both the right and left wings of the political spectrum.

To derive embryonic stem cells, it is necessary to remove critical cells from an embryo, resulting in its destruction. That triggers opposition from right-to-life critics of the research, who cite moral and ethical concerns. The research has also generated opposition from some members of the women's movement who object the use of stimulating drugs in women who agree to donate eggs for cloning research aimed at creating specialized embryonic stem cell lines.

The latest findings have the potential to render both of those objections moot, since the research showed that introducing four genes into cells derived from skin cells, called human fibroblasts, resulted in cells that essentially share all the features of embryonic stem cells - but without using or destroying embryos.

"It holds a great deal of promise for freeing this whole area of research from those two main sources of friction," Charo says. The discovery also creates questions about the future of government funding for traditional embryonic stem cell research, which in recent years has been a contentious political issue.

"It's going to fuel those who call for preferential federal funding only for non-embryonic stem cell research and it will certainly complicate any efforts to expand funding for embryonic stem cell research at the federal level," she says. Twice, Congress has passed legislation to overturn the Bush administration policy on embryonic stem cell research and allow funding for research using any embryonic stem cell lines, not just those designated by the administration in 2001. Twice, President Bush has vetoed it.

"Any piece of research like this that suggests that we can get cell lines that are equally usable without having to go through an embryo in intermediate steps is going to undermine any effort on the part of Congress to overturn the Bush policy," she says.

The latest discovery, however, is likely to suggest avenues of research that are already eligible for federal funding. Recently, the White House directed the National Institutes of Health to emphasize the funding of research that examines alternative means for obtaining pluripotent cell lines whose usefulness is comparable to that of human embryonic stem cells.

"No matter how well this new technique can be used for many of the disease-research and disease-treatment applications foreseen for embryonic stem cell and cloning research, however, calls for criminalization or wholesale de-funding of embryonic stem cell and cloning research are not warranted," Charo adds. "Criminalizing any area of science, as opposed to merely regulating it, would be contrary to the political and constitutional traditions of academic and scientific freedom, as well as the historical spirit of inquiry that characterizes this country."



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Study Identifies Gene Alterations in Lung Cancer

An international team of scientists, supported in part by the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), one of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), has announced that its systematic effort to map the genomic changes underlying lung cancer has uncovered a critical gene alteration not previously linked to any form of cancer. The research, published in the advance online issue of the journal Nature, also revealed more than 50 genomic regions that are frequently gained or lost in lung adenocarcinoma, the most common type of lung cancer in the United States.

“This view of the lung cancer genome is unprecedented, both in its breadth and depth,” says senior author Matthew Meyerson, a senior associate member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in Cambridge, Mass., and an associate professor at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School in Boston. “It lays an essential foundation, and has already pinpointed an important gene that controls the growth of lung cells. This information offers crucial inroads to the biology of lung cancer and will help shape new strategies for cancer diagnosis and therapy.”

Each year more than 1 million people worldwide die of lung cancer, including more than 150,000 in the United States. The new study focused on lung adenocarcinoma, which, according to the National Cancer Institute (NCI), is the most frequently diagnosed form of lung cancer in the United States, accounting for approximately 30 percent of cases.

New approaches to cancer treatment rely on a deeper understanding of what goes wrong in tumor cells to spur uncontrolled growth. Through decades of research, it has become clear that lung cancer -- like most human cancers -- stems mainly from DNA changes that accrue in cells throughout a person’s life. But the nature of these changes and their biological consequences remain largely unknown, which has inspired the recent formation of multi-disciplinary teams that are using new genomic tools and technologies to study cancer in a more systematic, comprehensive manner.

The latest study was conducted as part of the Tumor Sequencing Project (TSP), an ongoing effort to apply large-scale approaches to the identification of genomic changes in lung adenocarcinoma. NHGRI is a major funder of TSP, which unites scientists and clinicians throughout the cancer research community.

“This outstanding work clearly demonstrates the value of comprehensive approaches for exploring the genomic underpinnings of cancer. The impacts of these findings extend far beyond lung cancer and indicate that many more important cancer-related genes still await our discovery,” NHGRI Director Francis Collins says. “Now, we must forge ahead and apply this strategy as quickly as possible to other common types of cancer.”

Specifically, the TSP researchers uncovered a total of 57 genomic changes that occur frequently in lung cancer patients. Of these changes, more than 40 appear to be associated with genes not previously known to be involved in lung adenocarcinoma. More research is needed to precisely identify and characterize these genes, but researchers are excited by the possibility that their findings may suggest new ways of attacking this deadly cancer.

The most common abnormality identified by the TSP team involves a region on chromosome 14 that encompasses two known genes, neither of which had been previously associated with cancer. Through additional studies in cancer cells, the researchers discovered that one of the genes, NKX2.1, influences cancer cell growth. NKX2.1 normally acts as a master regulator that controls the activity of other key genes in cells lining the lungs’ tiny air sacs, called alveoli. The discovery that a gene functioning in a select group of cells - rather than in all cells - can promote cancer growth may have broad implications for the design of drugs for a wide range of cancers.

“The genomic landscape of lung cancer gives us a systematic picture of this terrible disease, confirming things we know, but also pointing us to many missing pieces of the puzzle. More broadly, the study represents a general approach that can and should be used to analyze all types of cancer,” says Eric Lander, one of the study’s co-authors and founding director of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.

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Children's Ability to Describe Past Event Develops Over Time

In the first study to examine how children talk about the time-related features of their experiences--when, how often, in what order events occur--researchers have found intriguing changes as children grow older. The study’s findings may have implications for understanding these aspects of cognitive development as well as for questioning child witnesses and victims.
The study was conducted by researchers at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and the University of Cambridge. It appears in the July/August 2007 issue of the journal Child Development.

The researchers analyzed forensic interviews of 250 four- to 10-year-old children who were alleged victims of sexual abuse, focusing on the kinds of references to time they made when describing these real-life events.

The children made increasing numbers of references to time-related characteristics of experienced events as they grew older, the researchers found. However, witnesses under 10 seldom mentioned specific times or dates, or what happened before reported events or actions. There were dramatic increases to such references at the age of 10.

References to the sequence of events or parts of events were most common, and their increase with age may be related to children’s developing capability to elaborate. Children were more likely to mention time spontaneously when asked to recall what happened than when they were asked specific recognition questions. This is pertinent because information retrieved from memory by recall is much more likely to be accurate than information retrieved in response to questions that ask children to select among options offered by the interviewer (such as “Did he …"” or “Was it x or y"”).

The children remembered the times of past events by making references to clock times, events that occurred in the same time frame, or the calendar, the researchers found. While older children were capable of using both short- and long-scale time patterns (such as time of day and day of the month), younger children mostly referred to short-scale time patterns (such as time of day), or they anchored the events to familiar activities (such as “when I returned from school”).

These findings have important implications for forensic interviews, where the ability to provide information about the number of incidents, the time of occurrences, and the sequence of events may allow suspected victims and witnesses to define specific episodes of allegedly experienced crimes. This ability increases children’s competence as witnesses and the prospect that their cases will be pursued in the criminal justice system. In addition, awareness that children acquire some temporal skills late in their development may discourage attempts to discredit child witnesses when they fail to provide the requested time-related information.

“By helping forensic interviewers to recognize children’s capabilities and limitations, our findings may also encourage interviewers to seek essential temporal information using age-appropriate techniques,” according to Yael Orbach, staff scientist at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) and the study’s lead author.

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Bush Should Include Federal Research As Priority

President Bush should not neglect U.S. federal spending on research and development in either his televised State of the Union speech tonight nor his upcoming proposed federal budget for the 2008 fiscal year, according to a group that promotes research.

"The president in his State of the Union speech and 2008 budget proposal has a chance to show real leadership by calling for renewed emphasis on science and research as the future of our economy," says former U.S. Rep. John Edward Porter (R-Ill.), chair of Research!America.

"America's economic destiny is, without question, tied to our investment in scientific research. Research offers the promise of better health and of better-paying jobs for a better future. I hope the president will outline a vision to speed the pace of science and better prepare our children for careers in a knowledge-based economy.

"In an August 2006 Research!America poll, a majority of Americans said more funding for medical and health research now is essential to our future health and economic prosperity," Porter adds. "This is a time of unprecedented opportunity for science when the U.S., with our talent pool and research capabilities, could be leading the world in medical and scientific advances. We must boost spending for all science and research, not just certain areas. At stake is our standing in the world and our children's standard of living."

In particular, President Bush must focus both on federal support for research and development in the physical sciences and health sciences, says Research!America President Mary Woolley.
"We applaud the president's anticipated call for more physical science funding in 2008, such as the research funded by the National Science Foundation," Woolley says. "However, advances in physical and life sciences go hand in hand: how would we have outpatient laser treatment for glaucoma without research that developed safe lasers and research that helped us understand the workings of the eye?

"Research!America would be extremely concerned if the president's 2008 budget for research for health fails even to match inflation, as was thecase last year for the National Institutes of Health and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality -- or worse, falls below prior years' budgets, as occurred last year with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's critical core programs," she adds. The investments of the past are now bearing fruit, for instance, in the decrease in cancer mortality, and theAmerican people expect that success to continue -- not slow down. When federally funded health research stalls, we lose family members prematurely, our economy loses productivity when workers become sick, and America begins to lose its position as a global leader in science."


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