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There's A Hunger Problem On America's College Campuses

Montclair State University’s food pantry is tucked away down a maze of hallways in the student center. Like the hunger problem on campus itself, the pantry is not quite out in the open.It opened on the New Jersey college’s campus in April, after administrators started hearing from students who said they were hungry and didn’t have enough money for food. They surveyed students, finding that more than half said they or someone they know experiences “food insecurity” — the lack of access to affordable, nutritious food.

A new report shows that the college campus hunger problem goes far beyond a few sad stories. It surveyed more than 3,000 students at a mix of 34 community and four-year colleges, finding that 48% experienced food insecurity in the past 30 days.The data suggests that hunger is more common among college students than the U.S. population as a whole, in which 14% of households experience food insecurity each year, according to the government. 

“A majority of students who are food insecure were also working and receiving financial aid,” said Clare Cady, an author of the report and co-founder of CUFBA. The study found that 56% of food insecure students were currently employed, more than half received a federal grant, and 18% had received a private scholarship.”We’re talking about students who are doing all the things we’d expect them to do and they’re still not able to support themselves while in school,” Cady said.

Across the country, most campus food pantries are funded through donations, but some receive stipends from a school group. They’re widespread, but are mostly at public universities. They serve students at big names like Michigan State University, the University of Missouri, Penn State and Syracuse, as well as smaller community colleges. At Montclair State, the food pantry operates solely on donations. The Alumni Relations and Annual Giving foundation raised $10,000 over the summer and New Jersey-based Inserra Supermarkets gave the pantry a refrigerator and makes regular food donations.As word has spread, more students are using the pantry.”But it’s still one of those things people don’t talk about,” said Chris Beckus, another student volunteer.The pantry itself, a windowless room with fluorescent lights, isn’t exactly easy to stumble upon. But those who need it are finding it.”It would be wonderful if one day we just don’t need it anymore,” deCarvalho said.

SOURCE…money.cnn.com

Hunter-gatherers' Active lifestyles make the rest of us look shamefully lazy

Most days, the men walked briskly on the hunt for game animals, while the women foraged for and prepared wild foods.On average, the Hadza achieved about 75 minutes of moderate to vigorous physical activity a day.

To put that number in context, Australian health authorities recommend we engage in at least 150 minutes of moderate physical activity a week, or 75 minutes of vigorous physical activity a week.Most of us living modern Western lifestyles don’t meet those targets. In Australia, 60 percent of adults do less than 30 minutes of moderate physical activity per day — way below the Hadza.That matters because the Hadza have a super low risk of cardiovascular disease, including low rates of high blood pressure and blood cholesterol, unlike us in the West stricken by the so-called diseases of civilisation.

Another noteworthy finding about the Hadza’s physical activity: it doesn’t decline with age. The older Hadza (it’s not uncommon for them to live into their 70s and even 80s) stayed as active as younger generations — unlike our society, where physical activity drops off sharply as we age.Raichlen acknowledges the Hadza’s heart health is likely influenced by other factors too (such as their diets — most continue to forage and rely on wild foods), but says studying their lifestyles bolsters the obvious-but-overlooked theory that aerobic activity is a must for health.

“The overarching hypothesis is that our bodies evolved within a highly active context, and that explains why physical activity seems to improve physiological health today,” he said in a statement.He believes studying the Hadza gives us an insight into the physical activity levels that drove the evolution of healthy human hearts, muscles and brains.“The answer is not likely 30 minutes a day of walking on a treadmill,” he said. “It’s more like 75-plus minutes a day.”
Read more …./coach.nine.com.au

More Young People Contracting 'Old-Age' Conditions Due To Sedentary Lifestyles

People in their 20s and 30s are being treated for varicose veins, knee joint problems and other conditions usually associated with old age.Bad postures and sedentary lifestyles have led to a rise in the number of younger people experiencing complaints such as back pain and haemorrhoids, according to analysis by Bupa Data from more than 60,000 medical procedures in 2015 was compiled by the private healthcare group. It found treatment traditionally offered to older generations was increasingly being sought by younger people, aged mainly between 25 and 45 – a shift it attributed to time spent sitting at desks, watching box sets and using smartphones and tablets.

Removal of Bad posture and sedentary lifestyles have been blamed for a rise in the number of young people seeking treatment for conditions traditionally associated with old age. Two of the most common procedures in the heart and circulatory diseases category for both 26 to 35-year-olds and 36 to 45-year-olds.“Haemorrhoid removal and treatment for varicose veins are procedures that people in this age group should not be encountering,” said Dr Steve Iley, Bupa’s medical director in a statement.“However, when you consider the amount of time young people now spend sat using their mobiles and tablets, streaming box sets or playing with the latest games console, you can see why these conditions are rising in this age group.”Among the five most common procedures for 36 to 45-year-olds were arthroscopic knee operations, a surgical technique by which a tiny camera is used to look inside the knee.

Epidural injections at the base of the spine, used to treat back pain, was also in the top five for this age group – a 10 per cent rise from 2014, a Bupa spokesperson told The Independent.And arthroscopic knee operations were even one of the five most common procedures among 16 to 25-year-olds. Searches for stress-related conditions on Bupa’s website had also increased, it said, suggesting this could be due to longer working hours, busy schedules and a lack of ability to “switch off”.

Experts have warned that repeatedly looking down at mobile phones and other devices has led to a rise in the number of young people experiencing back and neck pain.Among 16 to 24-year-olds, 45 per cent said they were currently living with neck or back paincompared to 28 per cent of 18 to 24-year-olds asked the previous year, according to a survey by the British Chiropractic Association (BCA).Tim Hutchful, a BCA chiropractor, said he was “concerned that the number of patients under the age of 30 coming through our doors is increasing”.

“When people use laptops or mobile phones in bed they tend to forget their posture, hunch over the screen and leave their spine unsupported, which can damage posture and cause back or neck pain,” he said.Bupa said searches for “piles”, “IBS [Irritable bowel syndrome]” and stomach ulcers on its website had increased by up to 240 times in one year since 2014.

SOURCE… www.independent.co.uk

Bionic leaf turns sunlight into liquid fuel | Harvard Gazette

The days of drilling into the ground in the search for fuel may be numbered, because if Daniel Nocera has his way, it’ll just be a matter of looking for sunny skies.Nocera, the Patterson Rockwood Professor of Energy at Harvard University, and Pamela Silver, the Elliott T. and Onie H. Adams Professor of Biochemistry and Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School, have co-created a system that uses solar energy to split water molecules and hydrogen-eating bacteria to produce liquid fuels.

The paper, whose lead authors include postdoctoral fellow Chong Liu and graduate student Brendan Colón, is described in a June 3 paper published in Science.“This is a true artificial photosynthesis system,” Nocera said. “Before, people were using artificial photosynthesis for water-splitting, but this is a true A-to-Z system, and we’ve gone well over the efficiency of photosynthesis in nature.”

While the study shows the system can be used to generate usable fuels, its potential doesn’t end there, said Silver, who is also a founding core member of the Wyss Institute at Harvard University.The beauty of biology is it’s the world’s greatest chemist — biology can do chemistry we can’t do easily,” she said. “In principle, we have a platform that can make any downstream carbon-based molecule. So this has the potential to be incredibly versatile.”

Dubbed “bionic leaf 2.0,” the new system builds on previous work by Nocera, Silver, and others, which — though it was capable of using solar energy to make isopropanol — faced a number of challenges. Chief among those, Nocera said, was the fact that the catalyst used to produce hydrogen — a nickel-molybdenum-zinc alloy — also created reactive oxygen species, molecules that attacked and destroyed the bacteria’s DNA. To avoid that, researchers were forced to run the system at abnormally high voltages, resulting in reduced efficiency.

“For this paper, we designed a new cobalt-phosphorous alloy catalyst, which we showed does not make reactive oxygen species,” Nocera said. “That allowed us to lower the voltage, and that led to a dramatic increase in efficiency.”The system can now convert solar energy to biomass with 10 percent efficiency, Nocera said, far above the 1 percent seen in the fastest-growing plants.

In addition to increasing the efficiency, Nocera and colleagues were able to expand the portfolio of the system to include isobutanol and isopentanol. Researchers also used the system to create PHB, a bio-plastic precursor, a process first demonstrated by Professor Anthony Sinskey of MIT.

The new catalyst also came with another advantage — its chemical design allows it to “self-heal,” meaning it wouldn’t leach material into solution.“This is the genius of Dan,” Silver said. “These catalysts are totally biologically compatible.”Though there may yet be room for additional increases in efficiency, Nocera said the system is already effective enough to consider possible commercial applications, but within a different model for technology translation.

“It’s an important discovery — it says we can do better than photosynthesis,” Nocera said. “But I also want to bring this technology to the developing world as well.”Working in conjunction with the First 100 Watts program at Harvard, which helped fund the research, Nocera hopes to continue developing the technology and its applications in nations like India with the help of their scientists.In many ways, Nocera said, the new system marks the fulfillment of the promise of his “artificial leaf,” which used solar power to split water and make hydrogen fuel.

“If you think about it, photosynthesis is amazing,” he said. “It takes sunlight, water, and air — and then look at a tree. That’s exactly what we did, but we do it significantly better, because we turn all that energy into a fuel.”

SOURCE…news.harvard.edu/

The Ultimate Exercise

edit

Editing Humans

The CRISPR Gene-Editing Tool is Finally Being Used on Humans

A team of scientists in China has become the first to treat a human patient with the groundbreaking CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing technique. While the results of the trial are uncertain, it’s a historic milestone that should serve as a serious wakeup call to the rest of the world. A research team led by oncologist Lu You at Sichuan University delivered modified immune cells into a patient suffering from an aggressive form of lung cancer. The scientists used CRISPR-Cas9 to make the cells more resilient in the presence of cancer, marking the first time that the powerful gene-editing tool was used to treat a human.

The study was limited to one patient in order to test the safety of CRISPR. Given the encouraging results, another 10 patients will be treated as part of an ongoing clinical trial being conducted at the West China Hospital in Chengdu. the use of CRISPR is significant in that it’s the most efficient, powerful, and easy-to-use system currently available. The news that CRISPR has finally been used on a human patient is bound to attract the attention of scientists elsewhere, and accelerate the race to get gene-edited cells into clinics. As University of Pennsylvania immunotherapy professor Carl June told Nature News, “I think this is going to trigger ‘Sputnik 2.0’, a biomedical duel on progress between China and the United States, which is important since competition usually improves the end product.”

Genetically modified cells have been transplanted into humans before, but to treat the patient with metastatic lung cancer, Lu’s team removed immune cells from his blood, and then “knocked-out” a gene using CRISPR-cas9. The unwanted gene codes for a protein that interrupts a cell’s immune response—a genetic quirk that cancer exploits to spread itself even further. The modified cells were then cultured to create a large batch, and injected back into the patient. It’s hoped that the edited cells will attack and defeat the cancer, and Lu says the initial treatment went well.

The US is a bit behind China in this area, reflecting the contrast between China’s unwavering enthusiasm for biotechnology and America’s trepidation when it comes to such work. In 2015, a different team in China became the first to genetically modify a human embryo using CRISPR. Scientists and bioethicists in the United States took notice, approving a number of baby-step guidelines that should put America on a similar path. The latest breakthrough by Lu and his team will likely motivate similar efforts in the US and elsewhere. And indeed, there are already plans in the US to start clinical trials using CRISPR to treat bladder, prostate, and renal-cell cancers, though none of these trials have been approved, nor do they have adequate funding.

SOURCE..www://gizmodo.com

How Your Genetic Sequence Can Be Exploited By The Supplement Industry

The alternative health industry is widely broadcasting that so-called dangerous genetic variation is lurking in the human population, causing a public health crisis that is ignored by the medical community.This curious forewarning appears to have emerged out of an explosion of direct-to-consumer genetic testing and health gurus preaching that “natural” remedies can override our genetic make-up. Look no further than Deepak Chopra, who has gone deep down the rabbit hole in suggesting that our thoughts can rewire our biology.

Alternative practitioners are now forging highly profitable businesses based on patients coming to them with raw genetic data provided by testing companies, typically 23andMe, and walking away with hundreds if not thousands of dollars in nutritional supplements.But scientific and medical experts recommend against blindly screening for genetic variants called single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). They warn that these tests carry problems of false results, over-diagnosis and meaningless information. Alternative medicine promoters argue otherwise, and they are spreading the message while churning big profits.

Ben Lynch, a naturopathic doctor in Washington state, has built an online empire centered on selling genetic analysis and naturalistic treatments for particular genetic variants, which are highly common and have almost no impact on health or disease. In an email, Lynch told me that he recommends screening for genetic polymorphisms to everyone who “wants to optimize their life and reduce risk.”Based on his own reading of the scientific literature, Lynch created an online platform, StrateGene, that flags SNPs from genetic raw data provided by direct-to-consumer testing companies 23andMe and Genos Research. On another site, Seeking Health, he sells products marketed to “target” biochemical pathways involving genes containing SNPs that StrateGene recognizes.*

Ricki Lewis, an author of genetics books (her latest coming out next month) and licensed genetic counselor who holds a Ph.D. in human genetics, cautions that any health practitioner who sells such services “is a modern-day version of a snake oil salesperson.”In 2007, Lynch graduated from Bastyr University, an accredited naturopathic program, outside Seattle. Naturopathy comprises a variety of alternative medicine practices including homeopathy, herbal medicine and healing touch. As a naturopathic doctor in Washington state, Lynch is considered to be a primary care physician. But it is important to note that graduates of accredited naturopathic programs only complete a minuscule portion of the training received by medical doctors.

Lynch reported to me that he no longer directly sees patients. He stated he is now “busy researching and educating,” which includes teaching continuing education courses and speaking at conferences hosted by Bastyr. Lynch is also the founder of Seeking Health Educational Institute (SHEI), which provides him with another revenue stream. Here, Lynch sells virtual courses to health practitioners wanting to implement genetic screenings, consultations and treatments into their businesses. These courses are also available directly to patients. He claims to teach how to create a million-dollar online business, as he allegedly did for himself while “in medical school.” And through a pyramid-like incentive scheme, Lynch gives commission to SHEI members who recruit others into buying StrateGene and SHEI products.

SHEI operates using a referral program to connect StrateGene and Seeking Health clientele with practitioners who have taken his online courses and paid annual membership fees. The practitioners listed on the site’s directory include acupuncturists, chiropractors, naturopaths, nutritionists, nurse practitioners and a few physicians. Lynch’s own brand of polymorphism screening and subsequent sales of supplements is often reproduced on the practice websites of his SHEI members.Debra Doyle, the genetics coordinator for Washington State Department of Health, is highly concerned that practitioners are selling such treatments and highlights that there is a “significant conflict of interest in any clinician who recommends or prescribes a therapy or treatment regimen that he or she would profit from directly.” In her opinion, “such practice would be highly unethical.”

So much of this alternative practice zooms in on one gene in particular: MTHFR.Lynch runs yet another website affiliated with SHEI and StrateGene called MTHFR.net. He boasts that this site is the “leading resource for unbiased, researched information strictly about the MTHFR mutation [sic].” Despite numerous errors in his use of genetic terminology, Lynch benefits from the fact that his ideas are widely consumed in the alternative medicine communityThe MTHFR gene encodes an enzyme called methylenetetrahydrofolate reductase. This enzyme is part of the metabolism of folic acid—an important B vitamin for many biochemical pathways, including the processing of some amino acids.

NASA Using LightMD Technology to Bring Relief In Clinical Trials

In a press release by Jerry Berg of Marshall Space Flight Center, he speaks on how NASA is  promotingthe use of LightMD’s LED phototherapy technolgy to bring relif in clinincal trials.

“We’ve already seen how using LEDs can improve a bone-marrow transplant patient’s quality of life,” said Dr. Harry Whelan, professor of neurology, pediatrics and hyperbaric medicine at the Medical College of Wisconsin. “These trials will hopefully help us take the next steps to provide this as a standard of care for this ailment.”

 

A nurse holds a strange-looking device, moving it slowly toward a young patient’s face. The note-card-sized device is covered with glowing red lights, but as it comes closer, the youngster shows no fear. He’s hopeful this painless procedure using an array of lights will help ease or prevent some of the pain and discomfort associated with cancer treatment.

The youngster is participating in the second phase of human clinical trials for this healing device. The first round of tests, by Medical College of Wisconsin researchers at Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, was so encouraging doctors have expanded the trials to several U.S. and foreign hospitals.

“We’ve already seen how using LEDs can improve a bone-marrow transplant patient’s quality of life,” said Dr. Harry Whelan, professor of neurology, pediatrics and hyperbaric medicine at the Medical College of Wisconsin. “These trials will hopefully help us take the next steps to provide this as a standard of care for this ailment.”

The light is produced by light emitting diodes, or LEDs. They are used in hundreds of applications, from electronic clock displays to jumbo TV screens.

LEDs provide light for plants grown on the Space Station as part of commercial experiments sponsored by industry. Researchers discovered the diodes also had many promising medical applications, prompting NASA to fund this research as well, through its Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala.

Biologists have found that cells exposed to near-infrared light from LEDs, which is energy just outside the visible range, grow 150 to 200 percent faster than cells not stimulated by such light. The light arrays increase energy inside cells that speed up the healing process.

In the first stage of the study, use of the LEDs resulted in significant relief to pediatric bone-marrow transplant patients suffering the ravages of oral mucositis, a common side effect of chemotherapy and radiation treatments, according to Dr. David Margolis, an associate professor of pediatrics at the Medical College, working with Dr. Whelan on the study at Children’s Hospital.

Many times young bone-marrow transplant recipients contract this condition, which produces ulcerations in the mouth and throat, severe pain and in some cases, inflammation of the entire gastro-intestinal tract. Chewing and swallowing become difficult, if not impossible, and a child’s overall health is affected because of reduced drinking and eating.

“Our first study was very encouraging, and using the LED device greatly reduced or prevented the mucositis problem, which is so painful and devastating to these children,” said Whelan. “But we still need to learn more. We’re conducting further clinical trials with larger groups and expanded control groups, as required by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, before the device can be approved and available for widespread use.”

The treatment device was a 3-by-5-inch portable, flat array of light-emitting diodes. It was held on the outside of a patient’s left cheek for just over a minute each day. The process was repeated over the patient’s right cheek, but with foil placed between the LED array and the patient, to provide a sham treatment for comparison. There was no treatment of the throat area, which provided the control for the first study.

The researchers compared the percentage of patients with ulcerative oral mucositis to historical epidemiological controls. Just 53 percent of the treated patients in the bone-marrow transplant group developed mucositis, considerably less than the usual rate of 70-90 percent. Patients also reported pain reduction in their mouths when compared to untreated pain seven days following bone marrow transplant.

The clinical trials are expected to take approximately three years with a total of 80 patients. Participants currently include the Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee; Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo, N.Y.; and Instituto de Oncologia Pediatrica, in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Other domestic and international hospitals have asked to join the multi-center study.

Quantum Devices of Barneveld, Wis., makes the wound-healing LED device. The company specializes in the manufacture of silicon photodiodes, or semiconductor devices used for light detection, and light emitting diodes, for commercial, industrial and medical applications.

Source

Additional Sleep Has A High Monetary Value

We all know sleep matters for job performance. After a week of vacation, you may find your work better than ever. But rack up a week of sleepless nights — say, following a polarizing presidential election — and you may find yourself struggling.

It wouldn’t surprise anyone that sleep affects attention, memory and cognition — important factors in the workplace. But striking new research suggests the effect of additional sleep has a high monetary value. A paper — from Matthew Gibson of Williams College and Jeffrey Shrader of the University of California at San Diego, based on data from Jawbone, the fitness- and sleep-tracker company — says that additional time sleeping can translate into thousands of dollars in wages.

In fact, they calculate that a one-hour increase in weekly sleep raises wages by about half as much as an additional year of education. Now, the story is not so simple. Don’t think you can start to sleep more and you will instantly make more money. It’s more about the subtle interplay between how people schedule their lives, how much time they have available to sleep and how that affects worker performance and, ultimately, earnings.

To investigate how sleep affects worker wages, the researchers took advantage of a kind of natural experiment — sunset times across American time zones. Past research shows that people naturally end up sleeping longer when the sun sets earlier, for example in the winter, even if the person goes to bed well after dark. When the sun sets an hour later, it reduces nighttime sleep by roughly 20 minutes per week.

Within a single time zone, the time of sunset varies substantially, as the map below shows. For example, the sun sets about an hour and a half earlier in Mars Hill, Maine, than in Ontonagon, Mich., even though both are in the Eastern time zone. Because there shouldn’t be any significant differences in workers on the eastern or western edge of a time zone beyond the amount of time they sleep, researchers use this variation to calculate how much sleep influences wages.

They find that a one-hour increase in average weekly sleep in a location increases wages by 1.3 percent in the short run, which include changes of less than a year, and 5 percent in the long run. By moving to a location where a sunset is one hour earlier, a worker will make an additional $1,570 a year.

Those differences in wages end up being incorporated into the local economy. The researchers find that higher wages actually translate into higher home values as well. A county that experiences a sunset one hour earlier has on average a 6 percent higher median home value, about $7,900 to $8,800 dollars, they say. Not all of these wage differences are due directly to sleep, the researchers caution. Some could be due to the cumulative influence of other people. If the workers around you are made slightly more productive by sleeping better, that could make your work more productive, too.

The findings suggest that sleep is a crucial determinant of productivity and wages, “rivaling ability and human capital in importance,” the researchers write.Given the huge benefit that more sleep can bring, we should certainly pay more attention to ensuring that workers sleep more, they say.

SOURCE…www.washingtonpost.com

Harvard Study Decrypts The Ancient Mystery Of Consciousness

What is consciousness? Is human consciousness seated in our mind, body, brain—or some combination of all three? These questions have mystified philosophers and perplexed scientists for eons. Now, a team of neurologists from Harvard Medical School report that they’ve pinpointed a very specific triad of brain regions responsible for maintaining states of consciousness, or a lack thereof. The latest findings of their ongoing research were published online before print today in the journal Neurology.

This groundbreaking research on consciousness is being conducted by a team of scientists—including Aaron D. Boes, David B. Fischer, and Michael D. Fox—from the Berenson-Allen Center for Noninvasive Brain Stimulation at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) at Harvard Medical School. Coincidentally, my father, Richard M. Bergland, was chief of neurosurgery at the Beth Israel hospital for many years. My dad was always fascinated with the enigma of consciousness. In his 1986 book, The Fabric of Mind (Viking), my father referred to the brainstem as “the spark plug of consciousness.”

Your brainstem is a central axis that connects your cerebrum (Latin for “brain”) to your spinal cord and cerebellum. The brainstem is divided into three parts from north-to-south: midbrain, pons, and medulla. Among many functions, the brainstem influences our sleep-wake cycle, automatic breathing, heart rates, states of arousal, etc. If he were alive today, my dad would be over the moon to read the latest research from BIDMC. For the first time, this study homes in on a small “coma-specific” region of the brainstem—the rostral dorsolateral pontine tegmentum—that seems to drive consciousness through functional connectivity with two other cortical brain regions. One of these cortical regions is the left, ventral anterior insula (AI), the other is the pregenual anterior cingulate cortex (pACC). These three brain regions appear to work together as a triad to maintain consciousness.

Earlier this year, Boes received an award from the American Academy of Neurology for identifying a neural “consciousness network” that was affected by brain lesions on specific regions of the brainstem associated with cases of coma and vegetative states. In an April 2016 statement to BIDMC, Boes said, “We are investigating what regions of the brainstem are most critical to consciousness. Knowing the anatomy of this system offers great potential for the development of targeted therapeutic stimulation strategies to improve recovery from coma and other devastating disorders of consciousness.”

For this research, Boes used brain network imaging to identify and map brain networks in 12 patients who had become comatose following a localized brainstem injury. Then, he mapped the location of the injury relative to 24 other patients with brainstem injuries that did not cause coma. His results showed that any injury to a small area in the pons section of the brainstem (the rostral dorsolateral pontine tegmentum) is predictive of coma. As Boes explains, “We were excited to discover that this single tiny area is critical to consciousness. When it is damaged, almost every patient became comatose.”

After pinpointing this tiny area of the brainstem as a potential “seat of human consciousness,” Boes and his colleagues mined data from the connectome project to identify other brain regions that were functionally connected to this particular region of the brainstem in healthy individuals. The Human Connectome Project (HCP) aided them in creating a detailed map of the neural network associated with consciousness. (, “What Is the Human Connectome Project? Why Should You Care?“)

Lastly, the Harvard research team went back and examined fMRI brain images of 45 patients in a coma or vegetative state and discovered that activity in this novel brain network was selectively disrupted in patients lacking consciousness.

Arousal + Awareness = Consciousness

In conversations with my father about neurosurgery over the years, he would anecdotally describe dealing with the brainstem during an operation as being extremely sensitive (and potentially nerve-wracking) territory for him. As a brain surgeon, my father considered portions of the brainstem to be the most fragile and delicate parts of the human nervous system. Through his extensive neurosurgical experience, my father knew that damage to the brainstem was often correlated with someone not waking up after surgery. That being said, I have no idea if he was consciously aware that the small rostral dorsolateral pontine tegmentum area of the brainstem was specifically what he colloquially referred to as “the spark plug of consciousness.”

In his November 2016 statement to BIDMC, David Fox, Director of the Laboratory for Brain Network Imaging and Modulation, summed up the latest findings of his team, “For the first time, we have found a connection between the brainstem region involved in arousal and regions involved in awareness, two prerequisites for consciousness. A lot of pieces of evidence all came together to point to this network playing a role in human consciousness.”The researchers point out that arousal combined with awareness are the two critical components of consciousness. Using this model, arousal is most likely regulated by the rostral dorsolateral pontine tegmentum in the brainstem.The awareness aspect of consciousness may be directly linked to the connectivity of this brainstem region with the ventral anterior insula (AI) and pregenual anterior cingulate cortex (pACC). Although more research is needed, it appears that healthy functional connectivity of this brainstem-cortex network acts as a triad that may drive human consciousness.

Brainstem-Cortex Functional Connectivity Creates a “Consciousness Network”

In closing, Fox, who is also an Assistant Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School, concluded,

“We now have a great map of how the brain is wired up in the Human Connectome. We can look at not just the location of lesions, but also their connectivity. Over the past year, researchers in my lab have used this approach to understand visual and auditory hallucinations, impaired speech, and movement disorders. A collaborative team of neuroscientists and physicians had the insight and unique expertise needed to apply this approach to consciousness. This is most relevant if we can use these networks as a target for brain stimulation for people with disorders of consciousness. If we zero in on the regions and network involved, can we someday wake someone up who is in a persistent vegetative state? That’s the ultimate question.”

The next step for this BIDMC team is to dive deeper into other data sets in which patients lost consciousness to clarify if the exact same brainstem-cortex network is always involved…or, if there are other brain regions that come into play regarding human consciousness. Stay tuned for more on this exciting topic!

SOURCE…http://news360.com