Your brain on video games: updated review on positive and negative effects

This topic has been the subject of many controversial but fruitful debates among neurophysiologists, neurobiologists, psychiatrists, other medical experts, the layperson and video gamers of course. A recent review in Nature Reviews: Neuroscience published on-line for the issue of December of this year gathered the opinion of six experts in the field of video game addiction and its consequences on brain physiology and behavior. The review highlights the positive and negative consequences of video game playing and provides an in-depth perspective on the future of video gaming and how the positive effects of video games can be used to exploit video gaming for use in rehabilitation, educational settings and for enhancing certain cognitive skills while suppressing the negative effects of video gaming. For example, certain video games can improve memory such as those that involve trivia or using mnemonics (Where in the World is Carmen San Diego, Jeopardy, and the Oregon Trail)

The panel of six experts was asked four questions for which they needed to elaborate. Only those comments and opinions for which there is common ground will be shown in this article while the most relevant differences among the experts will also be highlighted.



C1. Does playing video games have beneficial effects on brain behavior?

There is a need to redefine the meaning of "video game". Just as cancer is a multitude of diseases categorized as such, there are hundreds of different types of video games of many genres. It is interesting to know that the media has categorized video games with a broad brush and there is usually a negative association when one thinks about video games, especially violent video games such as Grand Theft Auto. In terms on the beneficial effects of video game playing, there is some evidence that shows that "certain" type of video games, especially the ones that involve fast pace first-person shooters, improve peripheral vision, enhances attention, task switching, object tracking, decision making, eye-hand coordination, reaction time, enhancements in low-level vision, visual spatial capacity, among others. There is also some evidence of improvement in certain cognitive skills seen in video gamers compared to non-video gamers showing interesting enhanced basal cognitive effects. One particular expert noted that time spent playing is an important factor that should be involved in this equation. He specifically pointed out that brief periods of playing time is usually associated with a positive trend in enhanced cognitive and motor abilities for certain types of games while a negative association is seen when players spend more than four hours a day. In other words, time spent playing excessively will impair social and academic abilities in teenagers and young adults.

Another expert mentioned that many of the beneficial effects depends on the genre of the video game. Specifically, pro-social and role-playing video games that contain "chatting" or other social networking functions (ie., Tribes or Halo) that promote collaboration and multiple players tend to enhance social and leadership skills.

Does playing video games have negative effects on brain behavior?

This is a very controversial question that has not been clearly answered to date. Clearly, all the panel of experts agreed that excessive video game playing is co-morbid with other psychiatric disorders such as chronic depression, ADHD, autism-like behaviors, bipolar disorders, Internet addiction and anxiety spectrum disorders. Violent video games that involve the shooting and destruction of other human beings, animals and objects tend to produce anxiety behavior, and is associated with promoting confrontational and disruptive behaviors in affected individuals and increases “hostile attribution bias”. However, some experts cautioned to take the evidence with a grain of salt. They specifically commented that playing violent video games does not generate a "mass murderer" or directly promote violent and aggressive behavior but increases the likelihood and risk for developing such aggressive behavior. For instance, there have been reported incidents in which a thirteen year old killed his mother after repeatedly being told that he is “spending too much time playing video games”. Another incident involved a young adult father who killed his child who insisted for food while playing video games. Video games that tend to be more addictive are those that do not involve accomplishing a specific series of levels or goals but are simply role-playing tournament games.



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Research explains why children with autism have difficulty indentifying emotions

New research presented at the Society for Neuroscience this past Wednesday has provided a clear explanation of why children with bipolar disorder have difficulty identifying and identifying the correct emotions in facial expressions. In brief, children with autism, severe mood dysregulation or bipolar disorders have a hard time identifying facial expressions because the affected children spend less time looking at a someone's eye.

It has been known for many decades that children with bipolar disorders or severe mood dysregulation have deficits in labeling facial expressions. For instance, an affected child may recognize your face and facial expressions only with a particular set of clothing accessories such as a particular hat, scarf or other head gear. On the hand, that same affected child may not recognize you if you wear a different hat or scarf the following day.

This phenomenon has intrigued and puzzled psychiatrists for many years. However, the research presented at the Society for Neuroscience on Wednesday November 16 at Washington D.C., by Pilyoung Kim from the National Institute of Mental Health, claimed that children with bipolar disorder tended to spend more time looking at the nose and mouth regions of faces as opposed to the eyes compared to a healthy control group. Interestingly, severe mood dysregulation disorder children had the least accuracy in tagging the correct emotions to a set of photographs compared to normal children and bipolar children while bipolar children fared the worse.

The methodology behind these studies involved the use of a sophisticated eye tracker that was mounted as a headset onto the heads of children. Eye movements were measured with an EyeLink II head-mounted eye tracker. Participants saw photographs of people showing four emotions (anger, sadness, happiness, and neutral) and were asked to label the emotion for each face.

"In combination with other studies , our findings indicate the potential value of treatment programs that teach children how to identify emotions by looking at others 'eyes', said Kim " If such training helps children to process the emotional information in the world more accurately, that may in turn increase their ability to regulate their emotional reactions to social situations".

Non-invasive imaging technique for detecting breast cancer

Blurb (please click the link on top to access the complete report):

Micrometastases derived from breast cancer is extremely hard to detect using conventional methods (X-ray or mammograms) and usually requires highly invasive biopsies to remove various tissue samples from the patient for further diagnosis and corroboration. However, scientists from Lee Moffitt Cancer Center and Research Institute from Tampa, Florida have devised a new method for detecting advanced stage breast cancer.

The authors of the study showed that compared to normal breast tissue, breast cancer cells are known to produce high amounts of a protein termed carbonic anhydrase isozymes IX and XII, membrane bound enzymes involved in regulating the pH of blood and extracellular fluid. It is believed that the high levels of this enzyme can protect breast cancer cells from low oxygen levels and other toxicities compared to normal tissue.

The authors of the study, published in Clinical Cancer Research two days ago, came up with a very innovative way and non-invasive way of detecting breast cancer tissue. They produced an antibody specific for this two enzymes and conjugated the antibody to an infrared excitable dye. Indeed, the antibody conjugated to the dye is highly specific.


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Can viruses be designed from scratch using simple software applications to fight infectious diseases?

This is an idea that just spawned on me yesterday. The lines between the non-living and living have been blurred and there are some many ways that computers will assist us in many aspects of our lives. Right now, there are chip implants that have been testes in rats to improve memory and cereballar function and have been succesfully tested in Israel. It may be soon before new brain inferfaces will come out the market to help people with speaking disabilities or quadraplegic individuals.

Imaging having the ability to design new viruses to seek and destroy infectious bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics or design multiple viruses that can be used for gene therapy?

There are many viruses called phages that have the ability to infect and destroy bacteria including infectious bacteria (Staphylococcus and Streptococcus). The genomes of bacteriophages are relatively small compared to bacteria. Hence, designing viruses from scratch is not a far-fetched idea and the commercial software to create new synthetic viruses from scratch using synthetic genomics and modular gene design applications may all be possible with the click of an iPad or notebook within a few years.

Currently, scientists and clinicians can design and order small pieces of DNA called oligonucleotides or primers (20 to 30 base pairs ) that can be used to amplify DNA through PCR. These small and large biotech companies take orders over the Internet and synthesize DNA of up to 100- 150 bases (DNA has four bases) within two days.



DNA is the information that encodes for life and can be designed and stored as analog data in computers. On the other hand, what about synthesizing complete artificial genomes of viruses and bacteria? Is that even possible?

Nowadays, a few companies in the world such as Blue Heron can be contracted to design the genomes of not just new viruses, but bacteria and even mitochondrial genomes. Dr. Craig Venter and his team from Synthetic Genomics have generated and synthesized the genomes of different bacteria (Mycobacterium) from scratch and this process involves putting together many pieces of 1000 base pairs at a time to produce an artificial bacterial genome that was successfully transplanted onto another bacteria. Moreover, Dr Venter is on the verge of sequencing the genomes of thousands of marine algae and bacteria from across different parts of the world. When all this DNA information from all these microorganisms becomes available with the next two years, this information will give the necessary insight to the scientific community to fully understand genes and other pieces that were once unknown. For instance, many new antibiotics or even classes of anti-fungals may be discovered during Dr. Venter's acquatic quest around the world that can be used to destroy multi-drug resistant bacteria such as multi-drug resistant tuberculosis or MRSA.

Dr. Venter's accomplishment proves that the boundaries of biotechnology can be pushed significantly to the extent that viruses and bacteria can be synthesized de novo using a simple computers, software and robotic paltforms that are used to design and assemble viruses from scratch. Cloning pieces of DNA is not required to do this as synthesizing new DNA will be much faster than cutting and pasting different DNA coding regions as conventionally done in the research lab.

There are many commercially and freely available software such as Vector NTI that can analyze , organize, label DNA regions from thousands of base pairs belonging to a variety of organisms including that of viruses, mice, rat, worms, and humans. Moreover, all these genomes are available for free and can be downloaded from NCBI.

Moreover, bioinformatics software can be used to find genes of interests, non-coding regions or promoters which can give any researcher the necessary tools to design new genomes from scratch. However simplistic this may sound, synthesizing DNA using a DNA sequence that contains millions of base pair that was originally designed using computer software is very significant in that the fields of computer science and biology have given rise to cyber-genomics.

A brave new DNA world

The genomes of many bacteriophages are known and many of these bacteriophages have the ability to infect bacteria such as lambda X174 which infects E. coli. Viruses/bacteriphages can be found in the millions in the ocean. The problem is being able to isolate these bacteriophages for mass production is tedious and time consuming. For instance, right now there is a bacteriophage that infects Listeria monocytogenes is currently available for treating and protecting cheeses. However, the process of generating bacteriphages from scratch is possible using a synthetic genomics approach and the cost to do that will be feasible within a few years. Moreover, there is only a few companies that have proprietary software to do that.

Hence, it is possible that commercially available software to design new viruses from scratch through modular genetics may be soon available and can may be used by common computer processors and even iPads which lend the possibility of creating this type of software for genetic engineers, clinicians, scientists and even public health officials. Once a virus is designed that specifically attacks only one type of infectious bacterial strain, then the DNA code can be securely uploaded over the Internet to companies dedicated to synthesizing DNA and ship the viral genome back to client. The new synthetic viral DNA can be used to produce mass quantities of bacteria-chopping viruses in the lab by infecting human epithelial cells and concentrate the virus in extremely small volumes.

What about producing new antibiotics?

Moreover, these new viruses can be used to not only produce more viruses that infect infectious bacteria but also produce new classes of antibiotics if such type of antibiotics in the ocean. Phages may have the ability to destroy biofilms that are hard to remove by mechanical debridement and reach the center of the thick biofilm.

Dr. Craig Venter received the Dickson Prize in Medicine today and offered insights on how synthesizing DNA can solve many world problems

Dr. Craig Venter, the biotech entrepreneur who helped sequence the human genome and developed the shotgun sequencing technique, received the Dickson Prize in medicine today at the University of Pittsburgh, Alumni Hall. During his presentation, he briefly talked about his career, offered a historical perspective of how the DNA (3 billion base pairs) was read in its entirety ten years ago using the shotgun sequencing approach and demonstrated how his company can literally create artificial genomes from scratch using supercomputers and robotic platforms. Overall, his presentation was easy to follow for the lay person but offered very valuable insight of how his new technology will help to solve many world problems. After attending today’s presentation, I am convinced that Dr. Craig Venter has risen to the level of Steve Jobs (may he rest in peace) in the biotech industry for the following reasons outlined below: Dr. Venter has been able to merge the fields of biology, microbiology, biochemistry and computer science to create life from scratch by using supercomputers, DNA sequencers (HiSeq2000 and ABS300XL) in order to read DNA and write DNA. Moreover, his team developed the software and hardware to be able to synthesize new microbes from scratch or making hybrids of microorganisms that have a different set of genes. It is interesting to note that Dr. Venter relates many phenomena that occurs in biology to the field of computer science. DNA is the software that can be read by computers to convert that information to analog data (strings of 1’s and 0’s), and write DNA again using supercomputers/ DNA synthesizers while other microorganisms “boot up” the new "installed" DNA in order to produce new proteins or create a new species of bacteria. Technology is evolving too fast and is helping to significantly reduce the cost to read/write DNA. To put it in perspective, the human genome can be sequenced in less than two weeks for $4,000 using supercomputers the size of less than 3 feet by 3 feet and containing powerful 1.5 terabyte chips. He predicts that the cost will significantly go down and may be able to sequence human genomes in less than two days within five years. Overall, he has very ambitious but medically relevant and revolutionary goals he wants to accomplish. These are some of the highlights of his past accomplishments and future goals of Dr. Venter's company, Synthetic Genomics Inc.. 1. Dr. Craig Venter and his team were the first to sequence a diploid human genome 3 years ago. 2. He has taken on an ambitious project to study human DNA diversity: by sequencing hundreds of genomes from individuals from Africa and Europe, his team of investigators have found that there is 1-3% DNA variation among individuals outside of Africa and most of that variation is found in non-coding pieces of DNA. Oddly enough, there is a much higher DNA variation among different human beings from different groups in Africa than outside of Africa. Not sure what that means. 3. By sampling air from the 22nd floor of a building in New York, he found that 50% of DNA found in the air of New York was DNA derived from rats (probably from subway rats that shed hair/skin), 20-25% of DNA is derived from humans and the rest from other sources. He was boasting on the fact that the air in San Diego is cleaner as the DNA was derived from fungi, bacteria and human sources (epithelial cells shed by humans on a daily basis). He also sample DNA from different homes and hospitals from San Diego and found that hospitals harbored many infectious microorganisms compared to a residence. No surprise there either. He has sequenced entire genomes from microorganisms derived from ocean, the Red Sea, Black Sea and other parts of the world. In a nutshell, he discovered thousands of new genes with no known function and may take years to figure out what they do. Also, he claimed that he will propose a new classification scheme for classifying microorganisms by next year based on this data. On other projects, he has helped to sequence DNA genomes from gut bacteria (microbiota genomics project) derived from different individuals and has found that the human body contains about 16 million bacterial genes. 4. On more pragmatic biotech approaches, he is the first to synthesize a complete genome of a virus (lambdaX174) from scratch using supercomputers and robotic platforms and has learned a way to "boot up" by activating the virus and giving it the ability to infect and destroy bacteria. He has synthesized the most simple living microorganism (Mycoplasma) from scratch, and "transplanted" the DNA of one species of Mycoplasma to completely change another species after the genetic code has been "booted up". Interestingly, he has synthesized mitochondrial rat DNA from scratch and has refined a technique to allow yeast to store complete genomes of bacteria and transfer the new artificial DNA to other recipient bacteria. To quell some ethical concerns, he claims that all his artificial microbes have a watershed mark in which the name of this company and authors are imprinted in the genetic code of each organism's DNA in order to trace organisms that may get lost outside a lab. Obviously, only he has the original template to crack the code. Finally, he explained the ethical implications and the need for regulating this technology if it gets FDA approval for accelerating the production of new vaccines by synthesizing pieces of DNA and produce vaccines targets to produce vaccines. 5. On the more ambitious side: he plans to help solve world hunger and mass produce biofuels by synthesizing microorganisms from scratch that can produce sugars (starch), amino acids, vitamins and organisms that can use CO2 emissions from the air and produce methane, hydrocarbons or biofuels.

Zoldrenic acid increases survival rate among stage IV cancer women

It is breast cancer awareness month and we need to do everything as a community to combat this deadly disease. This news just came to my attention about the use of zoldrenic acid, a drug for treating osteoporosis, may increase survival in postmenopausal stage IV cancer women.The increase in survival rate is low but significant to placebo control group but never-the-less significant. Here is an excerpt of the summarized findings of today's article at the National Cancer Institute:

"A planned subset analysis of a phase III trial showed that adding zoledronic acid, a bisphosphonate, to standard adjuvant therapy for stage II or III breast cancer may improve outcomes in postmenopausal women. Overall, among the entire trial population of 3,360 women, the addition of zoledronic acid did not improve outcomes. However, among a subset of women who had undergone menopause 5 or more years before study entry, the 5-year overall survival rate was 85 percent for those who received zoledronic acid, compared with 79 percent for those treated with standard adjuvant therapy alone. These findings from the AZURE trial were published online September 25 in the New England Journal of Medicine and presented the same day at the 2011 European Multidisciplinary Cancer Congress. In the full study population, there were 17 confirmed and 9 suspected cases of osteonecrosis of the jaw in the zoledronic acid group and none in the control group. The benefit in overall survival among postmenopausal women “is a small but significant increase,” said principal investigator Dr. Robert Coleman in a news release. The finding is not conclusive on its own but “in the context of other studies and additional data anticipated later in the year,” he believes it may change practice".

More National Cancer Institute News: http://www.cancer.gov/ncicancerbulletin/100411/page3?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ncicancerbulletin+%28NCI+Cancer+Bulletin%29#e

iPad and iPhone applications for diabetes management

As many people with diabetes have used a variety of different glucometers, insulin pumps and other gadgets to control sugar levels, there are not that many nice applications that can put all the data together for the doctor to see in a very user friendly forma. I decided to do a quick research on currently available iPhone and iPad applications for people with diabetes. We can agree that the days of recording and monitoring insulin levels, calories and sugar levels on paper are long gone. As more diabetes related medical devices such as insulin pumps and glucose meters are becoming more compatible with PCs, Macs and cell phones, the trend will likely increase over the next decade as it is projected that over more than 30 million Americans will suffer from either Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes. The market projections for developing more diabetic medical devices and user friendly software is expected to net billions of dollars for pharmaceutical and software companies. Have no fear, the advent of new technologies that can interface with your glucose pumps, cell phones, desktops, iPad and laptops will be more practical to successfully monitor your health, exercise regimens and insulin intake. Today, if you have an iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, or an Android phone, you can download applications from your phone from iTunes, the Applestore, freeware sites and other websites for under $5.00 Here are a few applications listed here for starters. All these applications can be obtained through iTunes for less than $5.00! 1. Glucose buddy- This application lets you keep track and record your daily glucose levels, insulin intake, exercise regimens and provides basic statistical analyses of trends and averages. You can interact with the Glucose buddy forum to network with other people through the Internet. It is worth noting that their bar graphs are very colorful and enticing to see. This application is available for the iPhone, iPad and iPod. 2. WaveSense - Probably the most popular diabetes application to date from AgaMatrix. This application also allows you to log and record your glucose levels, calories, exercise regimen and take personal notes. It provides a better statistical analysis of daily, weekly, and monthly averages and projections. High, low, mode, variability, scatter plots, bar graphs, etc... are one of the few statistical analyses provided. You can directly send your results to your physician for their perusal.This application is also available for the iPhone, iPod and iPad. 3. OnTrack - Like the other aforementioned applications, this application allows you to lose monitor your pulse, blood pressure, weight and body fat which also makes it a useful weight loss application. Moreover, it provides basic statistical analyses and allows you to track your glucose and insulin levels. It is available for $2.00 and is extremely user friendly as results can be exported via e-mail to your medical team. This application is only available for the Android. 4. Vree-- This new application from Merck lets you also monitor and record your blood glucose levels, exercise, weight, blood pressure, and food and other medication intake. On the plus side, it comes with an encyclopedia calorie counter, tips and articles for weight loss and nutrition. On the downside, it does not come with a built-in feature to monitor insulin doses. This application is also available for the iPhone, iPod and iPad. Also, a few reviews have complained about the lack of a feature that allows you to monitor and send data more than 1 week's worth of data to your doctor. 5.Diabetes Tracker- Like all the other applications, it allows you to monitor your glucose levels, insulin levels, calories and exercise activities. However, this application allows you to track different types of insulin (slow, regular and fast insulin) throughout the day, gives you more statistical analysis, trends and projections. It is available for the Android for $1.49. More to come:IBGstar Diabetes Manager- This is the default application for the IBGstar glucose meter, a peripheral device that directly attaches to the iPhone4 to measure your glucose levels. It will provide a log function to record glucose and insulin levels, an alert system to alert you of important scheduled glucose reading and insulin shots, a trend chart for statistical analysis feature for calculating your daily, monthly and weekly trends and emails your results to your physician. This powerful application is expected to cost around $50.00 but provides more powerful statistical analyses of bio-stats, has better pull-down and touchscreen menu and interfaces with your laptop and desktop via the iPhone 4. It will hit the Apple store soon on March. Bottomline- The only thing or important feature missing in all iPhone and Android diabetes applications is the ability for the software to calculate the projected basal insulin levels in order to know how much insulin to inject before and after meals. However, fancy and "smart" applications that give this kind of projections require complex algorithms and only your physician can readjust the basal insulin intake. Did you find this article interesting? Will you like to receive more email alerts about medical technology related news? Then consider subscribing to my blog. If you have a blog, I will follow back!

Simple blood test can predict Alzheimer's disease with high accuracy

Alzheimer's disease is a really devastating disease of the brain with no present cure or therapy to slow down the progression of the disease. Although there is no cure at the moment, the diagnostics of the disease have significantly improved and scientists. For example, the combination of fluorescent dyes  (Pittsburgh B compound) with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a key diagnostic tool for predicting the outcome of the disease about 10 years before a patient develops symptoms. Now the first time have discovered that measuring two fatty acids or lipids in the bloodstream is correlated with a higher chance of cognitive decline. This simple blood test is faster, and probably more reliable than an MRI. One of these lipids is ceramide and the higher the lipid is found in the blood the higher the probability of developing dementia.  However, this type of diagnosis can help the patient by providing intensive therapy for those patients are highest risk but can also open the door for a lot of controversy as many small and large employers and even insurance companies may not be willing to hire people at risk of developing Alzheimer's disease or may drop their medical coverage all together years before developing the disease.

Read the complete article that was posted today on Medical News:
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/235462.php

This is amazing! It will be soon before quadraplegics and other paralized people will be able to walk with the assistance of robotic legs. Cyberdyne in Japan seems to have developed a prototype of prosthetic legs that may come out the market soon for handicap people. It is called the HAL cyberwalker or robot walker.

 Currently the US army has developed an exoskeleton similar to this but applied for the whole body so that soldiers can lift heavy load of supplies in a much faster and efficient way.

Please click on the link below to get the information of this article from Techradar posted today:

HAL Cyberwalker: http://www.techradar.com/news/world-of-tech/hal-robot-walker-shown-off-at-ceatec-2011-1031116?src=rss&attr=all