News Category: Science
Stroke Research at UBC 
The results of two studies involving patients who have survived severe strokes indicate that rehabilitation strategies for such patients need to be improved.
PhD student Jodi Edwards discovered that although more Canadians are surviving severe strokes, they are experiencing poorer quality of life after the event. Her study was published in the May issue of the journal Stroke.
Post-doctoral fellow Sean Meehan established that survivors of severe stroke use the prefrontal cortex area of the brain when learning new movements, to compensate for damage to the normally-involved motor region.
“Jodi’s study tells us that quality of life after stroke has decreased in the past decade,” says her supervisor, Lara Boyd, Canada Research Chair in Neurobiology of Motor Learning. “A potential reason for this decline is that while we’re good at rehabilitating patients who have suffered mild to moderately severe strokes, we have very little to offer the increasing numbers of Canadians who have survived a severe stroke. But Sean’s study is pointing to ways to make a major impact in post-stroke care.”
Edwards analyzed public health statistics from 1996-2005, a period when there were many advances in early-intervention treatment for severe stroke. Meehan studied functional magnetic resonance imaging results from health subjects and stroke patients to compare which parts of the brain were engaged in performing new tasks.
“This new information on how the brain compensates for damage suggests two potential strategies for rehabilitation: We could work on restoring the original brain function before the stroke occurred, or by promoting this new pathway,” says Meehan, who is Edwards’ lab mate and also supervised by Boyd.
“The convergence of these findings from seemingly divergent areas of research is telling us that the brain isn’t working in compartments with each area taking charge of certain functions that may be irrevocably damaged by injury or disease,” says Boyd. “Rather, the different domains of the brain are inter-related and may
work together to take on new challenges.”
UBC Alumni Magazine Trek Summer 2010, p. 9
Man, Mouse or Just Plain Chicken?
At the embryo stage, humans, mice and chickens apparently have a lot in common. Their faces, at least, are similar enough to allow Joy Richman to study chicken embryos to learn more about the development of the human face. Richman is a pediatric dentist and development biologist. Her work will provide new understanding around facial abnormalities such as cleft palate, today affecting one in 700 babies born.
“The chicken embryo is ideal to unravel these mysteries,” says Richman, who literally cuts postage-stamp sized windows into eggs that allow her to peer inside to the developing embryos with a microscope.
Many animal faces start out as a rudimentary oral cavity surrounded by buds of tissue called prominences that develop into a face. Richman is trying to discover what it is that, at the molecular level, stimulates indistinct cells to form specific structures of the face. To help, she has been awarded $900,000 from the Canadian
Institutes of Health Research.
Prior to receiving her grant, Richman had established that jaw development is linked to the presence of retinoic acid, a vitamin A derivative and a protein linked to bone formation. She did this by inserting beads containing the acid into a chicken embryo, which subsequently developed bones that would become a beak, where
normally there would be cheek bones.
Now she is investigating the genes that play a role in forming the centre of the face. She has already discovered a gene of interest “because it makes a protein that is secreted outside the cell and as such could play a pivotal role. It may act as an orchestrator, directing nearby cells into required patterns.” The protein is strongly
turned on during beak development, and placing a gene for the protein in an embryo caused the growth of an extra beak. Ongoing research will further determine the protein’s role in forming face and limbs.
“Our work will shed light on inherited birth defects that affect the skeleton including cleft lip, jaw size and shape abnormalities, and disturbances in the bones of the hands and feet,” says Richman. “Our results may also one day help to improve healing after injuries to the skeleton.”
UBC Alumni Magazine Trek Summer 2010, p. 5
Protected ocean areas can’t save coral reefs from climate change, new research shows
By Emily Jackson – Vancouver Sun – August 5, 2010, p. A9
The conventional wisdom that marine reserves can save coral reefs from climate change is wishful thinking, according to Simon Fraser University researchers.
In fact, marine reserves, areas of the ocean that are protected from overfishing and pollution, make coral reefs more vulnerable to higher temperatures, said Isabelle Cote, a professor of tropical marine ecology at SFU who has studied coral reefs for 25 years.
“If they can’t cope with fishing, they can’t cope with climate change either,” Cote said.
Experts have long agreed that reducing fishing and pollution would help coral reefs survive climate change, according to a 2008 report by the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network.
But Cote’s research contradicts this.
If it held true, higher water temperatures would cause less suffering for protected reefs than for unprotected reefs, she said.
Cote and her research partner, Emily Darling, analyzed more than 50 publications on the vulnerability of coral reefs to climate change for evidence supporting the theory. None was found.
Coral reef species that can’t deal with typical ocean pressures such as fishing and pollution do survive in protected areas, Cote said.
However, “When there’s a period of really warm waters, these species drop like flies because they’re really sensitive,” she said.
Because coral reefs outside of protected areas deal with more stress, the species they house are more resilient. These “tougher” reefs are more likely to withstand climate change, Cote said.
But that doesn’t mean that marine reserves don’t have a purpose.
“Inside marine protected areas you do get massive increases in diversity, species that you don’t find anywhere else,” Cote said.
Climate models are advanced enough now to predict which areas of the ocean will warm the most in the next 50 to 100 years, she said, and planners should use this information to ensure marine reserves are put in places that are the least likely to warm up.
Even without factoring in the potential for climate change, experts predicted that 15 per cent of the world’s coral reefs will be seriously threatened in 10 to 20 years, according to the 2008 report.
Coral reefs act as barriers during storms, provide seafood, are a source of sand for beaches and are home to millions of species.
And, says Cote, “We’ve only scratched the surface of the potential for these organisms to solve health problems.”
While Cote’s research was done in tropical climates, she said her conclusions might also apply to the temperate waters off B.C. “There are lots of strong parallels between tropical coral reefs and temperate kelp forests,” she said.
B.C. has 148 marine protected areas in place to conserve kelp beds, abandoned canneries and archeological sites.
Canadian scientists lead the way in analysis of Martian atmosphere
Team will develop spectrometer to use in search for signs of life on Red Planet
By Mike Barber – Vancouver Sun – August 3, 2010
A Canadian team will share a lead role in creating an instrument to analyze the levels of methane and oxygen in Mars’s atmosphere, potentially uncovering signs of life on the red planet.
The Canadian Space Agency announced Monday a team of Canadian scientists will develop the Mars Atmospheric Trace Molecule Occultation Spectrometer.
It is an extremely sensitive device that will orbit Mars and document the planet’s chemical makeup, said Victoria Hipkin, a planetary scientist with the agency and the project’s co-leader.
The spectrometer will be placed aboard the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter, a joint project of NASA and the European Space Agency scheduled to launch in 2016.
If successful, “it would set a very clear pathway for future Mars exploration,” Hipkin said. “It’s a very ambitious mission.”
The spectrometer has its roots in another Canadian endeavour, a satellite measuring trace amounts of gas on Earth that has yielded discoveries on ozone depletion and air quality since its launch in 2003, Hipkin said.
“We’re now applying this amazingly sensitive instrument to the Mars atmosphere to look for signs of activity,” she said. “This is an area in which Canada is currently leading the world.”
The spectrometer will search primarily for methane, which Hipkin called “a potential signature of biology on Mars.”
On Earth, both methane and oxygen are primarily produced by life—methane from algae and the digestive tracts of animals, and oxygen from plants.
“Together, they provide an amazing signature for anyone looking at Earth a long way away to say that there must be active biology on this planet, because those two gases will react together,” Hipkin explained.
The spectrometer will be able to measure how much methane there is at different locations around Mars, and how it changes throughout the seasons.
Areas with higher concentrations would indicate regions on Mars’s surface ripe for further exploration.
“Trying to understand its atmospheric chemistry is a different kind of fundamental look that we’re taking at Mars that hasn’t been done before,” Hipkin said.
“The technique we’re applying to Mars now is the primary one we will use to understand the planets beyond our solar system.”
Canadian sounds alarm on wombat carnage Down Under
Beaver-sized marsupials are dying by the thousands as roadkill on highways around Sydney, ironically in areas identified as reserves
By Randy Boswell – Vancouver Sun – July 22, 2010, p. B3
A young Canadian scientist, who earned her academic spurs studying moose and porcupines in the Great White North, is now grabbing headlines Down Under for her efforts to protect Australia’s iconic wombat, the beaver-sized marsupials that are dying by the thousands as roadkill on highways around Sydney.
University of New South Wales wildlife biologist Erin Roger, an Ottawa native who also went to school in British Columbia and Nova Scotia, has raised alarms over the wombat carnage in southeast Australia, where about 3,000 of the creatures are killed annually by cars and trucks—often, ironically, in areas identified as wombat reserves.
“I am interested in how roads are an often overlooked threat and how we continue to build more and more roads with little regard for the kinds of habitat and species populations we are fragmenting,” Roger said in an interview. “I feel like people have this sense of inevitability when it comes to roadkill, whereas in most other situations that kind of loss of life would be otherwise very concerning.”
Her research, featured last week in the Sydney Morning Herald and on Australian radio, has highlighted the potential need for mitigation measures such as fencing along roadways and animal-crossing structures.
In the Herald article, the Canadian researcher perhaps risked a backlash from Australians by expressing her surprise at the “negative” attitudes many in the country hold toward commons species such as the wombat and kangaroo—treating “icons as pests,” she said.
“The conservation of wildlife populations living adjacent to roads is gaining international recognition as a worldwide concern,” Roger and two UNSW colleagues wrote recently in the journal Population Ecology.
Their study noted that road deaths are having a significant, species-wide impact and are a greater threat to some wombat subpopulations than either of the traditional threats to the animal—diseases such as mange or predation by the dingo and Tasmanian devil.
Ancient underwater ecosystems found off Newfoundland’s coast
By Giuseppe Valiante – Vancouver Sun – July 21, 2010, p. B1
A team of Canadian and Spanish scientists has discovered forms of marine life previously unknown to science, some of which are more than 1,000 years old and hold the secrets to ancient underwater ecosystems.
The Fisheries Department and scientists from three Canadian universities and the Spanish Institute of Oceanography are on a 20-day expedition, using a robot to take pictures and to grab samples of coral and sponges up to three kilometres deep in the waters off the coast of Newfoundland.
The team is studying 11 areas under protection of the North Atlantic Fisheries Organization (NAFO) that are, collectively, about 1½ times the size of Prince Edward Island.
These areas are important because they contain the “trees of the ocean,” says Ellen Kenchington, research scientist with the Fisheries Department, who is one of the leaders of the expedition.
The coral that grows in this area can be several metres tall and change the flow of water currents. It also gives shelter to fish and other organisms.
“It’s a similar function a tree would serve in the forest, cutting down wind, providing branches for birds. We have the same type of communities that take shelter down there,” she said.
These coral and sponges—which are extremely fragile—are essential in keeping the areas abundant with the marine life that is fished by many countries around the world, including Canada, the U.S., the European Union and Japan.
Kenchington’s team is assessing whether more of these areas need to be protected from fishing in order to keep stocks sustainable.
During the course of the research, Kenchington’s team says it has discovered at least two new species of coral and six sponges in international waters, thousands of metres down.
Black coral, in particular, cements itself to the bottom of the ocean and can live more than 1,000 years. The coral has the equivalent of growth rings that can be revealed when sectioning its skeleton.
Kenchington said scientists can potentially look at the coral’s chemical composition and determine the temperature of the water and other data from as far back as 1,000 years.
“That’s how we are able to say if there is warming or a change in climate direction,” she said. “In order to understand the present we need to put it into context.”
‘Cold’ genes linked to disease prevention
In the constant battle between humans and pathogens, a University of Victoria research team including Crystal L. Schmerk and Catharine M. Bosio is one step closer to finding a new defense against infection.
Properties of Arctic microbes may allow harmful bacteria to be killed at moderate temperatures
By Randy Boswell, Vancouver Sun – July 15, 2010
A team of Canadian scientists has exploited the heat-hating properties of several species of Arctic bacteria to develop potentially life-saving—and lucrative—methods of genetically re-engineering harmful germs for new vaccines and safer microbiology research labs.
The remarkable discovery, detailed in the latest edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is described by the University of Victoria-led researchers as a possible breakthrough in preventing diseases such as tuberculosis and typhoid fever and in creating cheaper and more secure scientific facilities where risky bacteriological research is undertaken.
Among the Arctic microbes used in the B.C. team’s experiments is Colwellia psychrerythraea, a so-called “psychrophile” or a cold-loving bacterium that is known to leave a reddish tinge on the sea ice it sometimes inhabits in polar regions.
Another species used by the researchers, Shewanella frigidimarina, is described in the paper as coming from Arctic Ocean samples collected “near the northernmost point of Canada”—Ellesmere Island.
The scientists injected several “essential genes” from the cold-adapted organisms into more heat-loving, disease-causing germs, creating modified microbes that survived and reproduced in cooler conditions but quickly died at higher temperatures that would be found inside a human body or, in some cases, its warmer organs—such as the lungs.
Using the Arctic bacteria’s heat-sensitive traits to control when and where to trigger the deaths of harmful germs offers significant opportunities to develop new vaccines against various infectious diseases, the researchers state.
“Among the hundreds of psychrophilic bacterial species, there are undoubtedly numerous essential gene products that are inactivated at temperatures that are relevant to biotechnology applications,” the study states. “It is likely that a high proportion of newly found, temperature-sensitive essential genes could be used in any bacterium whenever there is a need to use heat to kill the bacterium at a moderate temperature.”
University of Victoria biochemist Francis Nano, one of five B.C. researchers who coauthored the study with a U.S. scientist, told Postmedia News on Wednesday that the team spent five years working on the project before hitting on the right combination of genetic traits to create viable organisms with a reliable, heat-triggered kill switch.
“People have been talking about using these cold-loving bacteria as sources of enzymes in laundry detergents that use cold water,” Nano said.
But the research team’s goal, he noted, is considerably more ambitious: To move the crucial traits of the Arctic bacteria “into some of the world’s most important pathogens” to combat fatal diseases around the world and to protect scientists from the “dangerous bacteria” they frequently handle in the name of medical research.
“The genes in our study fell apart between 33 and 37 degrees Celsius,” Nano stated in a summary of the study, “which means extraordinarily dangerous pathogens such as those that cause drug resistant staph infections, TB and even plague could be made inactive at body temperature and safe for vaccines and research.”
Nano said the team’s study has also illuminated the emerging importance of “bioprospecting” in the Arctic’s unique, organism-rich ecosystems, a field of scientific research and economic development in which Canada—despite its vast expanse of Arctic land and water—is falling behind more competitive polar nations.
He pointed to a 2008 UNsponsored report on Arctic bioprospecting that suggested Canada was not keeping up with countries such as the U.S., Russia and Norway in filing patents for biotechnology products derived from “Arctic genetic resources.”
Trent Ph.D. Study Disrupts Long-held Beliefs about Historic Grey Wolf Distribution in East N America
Dr. Linda Rutledge’s study of 16th century skull fragments suggests eastern wolves, not grey wolves, inhabited forests of eastern North America prior to arrival of European colonists
A research study conducted by Dr. Linda Rutledge, during her time at Trent University as a Ph.D. student in the Environmental & Life Sciences Graduate Program, and published this week in the journal Conservation Genetics, has the potential to impact wolf restoration efforts in the northeastern United States.
“This study brings the whole historic distribution of grey wolves into question,” said Dr. Rutledge, who is currently a post-doctoral researcher with the Natural Resources DNA Profiling and Forensic Centre (NRDPFC) at Trent. “The results challenge the idea that only grey wolves occupied eastern North America prior to the arrival of European explorers.”
The study, done in collaboration with anthropologists from Trent University, the University of Western Ontario (UWO), and McMaster University, compared the size and DNA of an approximately 500-year old jaw bone excavated from a pre-historic Iroquois village site in London, Ontario, to that of current wolf and coyote populations.
“We didn’t find any evidence that grey wolves inhabited southern Ontario in the 16th century, so these results are in direct contrast to the idea that a grey wolf subspecies inhabited the temperate forests of eastern North America,” Dr. Rutledge said. “That our results demonstrate the presence in this area of a distinct eastern wolf species rather than a grey wolf is really quite important for conservation because it makes us question the original distribution of grey wolves in the east.”
Once ranging across most of the United States, wolves were extirpated from all but a few regions by the mid 20th century. In eastern North America, these wolves were typically considered to be a grey wolf subspecies, but the genetic and morphological evidence presented in this new study reveal a different image of the wolf that roamed this area prior to European settlement.
Commenting on her research project, Dr. Rutledge said: “As a biologist, being able to collaborate with the Anthropology departments at three universities was really exciting, and being able to utilize the extensive resources available at Trent was really essential to the success of this project. The work wouldn’t have been possible without the ancient DNA facility in the Anthropology department and the sophisticated technological tools and genetic database available through the Biology department and the Natural Resources DNA Profiling and Forensic Centre (NRDPFC). I think future collaborations between the departments of Anthropology, Biology, and Indigenous Studies hold real promise for helping us unravel the natural history of wildlife populations. Ancient DNA really is the key to clarifying questions about extirpated and extinct species.”
To view the complete research article, see:
Rutledge LY, Bos KI, Pearce RJ, White BN. 2010. Genetic and morphometric analysis of sixteenth century Canis skull fragments: implications for historic eastern and gray wolf distribution in North America. Conservation Genetics 11: 1273-1281.
Student from B.C. names red seaweed after colourful movie director
Bridgette Clarkson titles new species as a tribute to Tim Burton’s ‘strange imagination’
By: Todd Coyne, Vancouver Sun, May 13, 2010, p. A5
Director Tim Burton has won many accolades during his successful career, but a B.C.-born researcher at the University of New Brunswick has honoured the filmmaker with an aptly bizarre tribute—seaweed.
Bridget Clarkston, a 29-year-old UNB doctoral student from Comox, decided to name the new species of red seaweed Euthora timburtonii as a tribute to the “similarly strange imaginations” she said she and the director share.
“I love The Nightmare Before Christmas and I love Tim Burton films because of his visual style,” said Clarkston. “His drawings are always a little bit dark, a little bit strange.”
Clarkston initially discovered the seaweed in 2007 off the coast of Bamfield, just across Vancouver Island from the beaches where she grew up. But Clarkston said that during the peer-review and verification phases since her 2007 discovery, the seaweed has also turned up in Tahsis, B.C., Friday Harbor, Wash., and even as far north as Haida Gwaii.
“There are lots of different types of red seaweeds in British Columbia—it’s very diverse compared to the rest of Canada,” said Clarkston on the phone from Fredericton. “The Pacific is much more diverse than the Atlantic … it’s an older ocean and there was a lot more time for species to evolve over there.”
Two weeks ago Clarkston sent letters to Burton, who is now judging at the Cannes Film Festival in France, by way of his agent and production company to alert them of her use of the director’s namesake. She has not yet heard anything back.
In the meantime, Clarkston already has two other new species and a whole new genus—a species classification—of red seaweed that she said she has discovered in B.C.
She has not yet submitted these species and genus for review but is confident that they are truly unique finds.
Clarkston plans to name her new genus Salishia, after Salish Sea, the alternate name proposed for the waters of the Strait of Georgia, Puget Sound and the Strait of Juan de Fuca, where the new genus of seaweed species is found.
In keeping with the otherworldly, Burton-esque naming scheme, Clarkston intends to call one of these yet-to-be published species Pugetia cryptica.
The other she will name Beringia wynnei after one of Clarkston’s heroes and marine biology predecessors, American phycologist Michael Wynne.
Though still rare, according to Clarkston, new species discoveries such as these are made increasingly easy to verify thanks to initiatives like the Barcode of Life project led by researchers at the University of Guelph in Ontario.
“It’s a real Canadian-driven initiative to sequence a standard genetic marker for every species on the planet—all plants, animals, fungi, protists. It’s like a global survey of all species,” said Clarkston. “This whole species discovery aspect of my research is all part of that Barcode of Life initiative funded by Genome Canada and the University of Guelph.”
Is ‘momnesia’ a real condition or an urban myth?
Vancouver-based researchers investigate the impact of pregnancy, including the child’s sex, on memory and cognition
By Chad Skelton, Vancouver Sun – May 8, 2010, p. A23
Liisa Galea is an award-winning researcher at the University of B.C. with a PhD in neuroscience.
So it was more than a little embarrassing for her when, pregnant with her second child, she couldn’t remember where her car was parked.
She knew she’d left it in the parkade across the street from her UBC office. But, for the life of her, she couldn’t recall what level she was on.
Even worse, this didn’t happen to her just once or twice—but nearly a dozen times throughout her third trimester.
Galea is far from the first woman to forget things during pregnancy, a phenomenon so common it goes by many names: “momnesia,” “baby brain” and “dumb Mom syndrome.”
But as an expert in the field of neuroendocrinology—the link between hormones and the brain—Galea was in a unique position to figure out what was going on.
In the decade since her parking problems, Galea has undertaken a number of studies on the impact of pregnancy on the brain, mainly on rats.
She’s found that pregnant rats are worse at making their way through mazes than non-pregnant rats and that their hippocampus (an area of the brain key to memory) is smaller.
And Galea’s just one of several Vancouver-based researchers trying to figure out whether “baby brain” is a real condition or just an urban legend.
Forgetful or just distracted?
On the face of it, the notion that having a child might impact a woman’s brain function is not that surprising. There’s plenty of evidence that hormones can affect thinking. And pregnancy has a uniquely dramatic effect on hormone levels—estrogen, for example, can reach concentrations 1,000 times normal.
When surveyed by researchers, almost all pregnant women say they suffer at least some memory problems and difficulty focusing.
But studies that try to test pregnant women’s memory in the lab have been decidedly mixed: some studies find they perform worse than non-pregnant women while others have not. Carrie Cuttler, a post-doctoral fellow at UBC and a colleague of Galea’s, began to wonder whether the lab itself might be the problem.
In a not-yet-published study, Cuttler and her colleagues asked 60 pregnant women and 24 non-pregnant women to perform a series of memory tests in their lab, such as repeating back a list of words.
As expected, the pregnant women did as well as the nonpregnant women on almost all the tests.
But that wasn’t the end of the study. As the women were leaving, Cuttler gave them a short, one-page questionnaire and asked them to mail it back to her the next day.
“It was stamped, it was addressed, it was ready to go,” said Cuttler. “All they had to do was pop it in the mailbox.”
Which is exactly what 70 per cent of the non-pregnant women did.
And the pregnant women? Just over half of those in their second and third trimester remembered to mail the letter.
And only one in four of those in the first trimester mailed it back.
Cuttler says the fact so many “baby brain” studies are conducted in the lab may be masking the extent of the problem—because for a harried, pregnant woman, a lab may be the first moment’s peace they’ve had all week.
“Pregnant women can perform on these cognitive tasks with little difficulty when they’re in a sterile, distraction-free environment, where they can focus on the task at hand,” she said. “But if you put them in the real world where they’ve got … family issues [and] work issues, their attention is much more divided. They have a lot more going on. That’s when you see the deficit.”
Cuttler said her study also suggests that “baby brain” may have less to do with brain chemistry and more to do with the sheer number of things a pregnant woman has to think about, from prenatal vitamins to doctor’s appointments.
That may explain why women in the first trimester—who’ve had the least amount of time to get used to being pregnant—fared the worst in Cuttler’s study.
A nice thing about her study, said Cuttler, is that it suggests pregnant women’s mental performance in the workplace need not suffer.
“If you put a pregnant woman in a quiet, distraction-free environment she can perform as well as a non-pregnant woman,” said Cuttler. “Maybe just don’t ask her to do a hundred things at once.”
Baby’s sex a factor
How many distractions a pregnant woman has in her life may not be the only thing affecting her brain.
Whether she’s carrying a boy or a girl also seems to make a big difference.
A few years ago, Neil Watson, a psychology professor at Simon Fraser University, conducted a study that looked at how 39 pregnant women—26 carrying boys, 13 carrying girls—performed on tests of their memory from early pregnancy to several months after delivery.
The study found a surprisingly significant gap in memory performance based on the sex of the mother’s fetus: those carrying boys scored about 25 per cent better on memory tests than those carrying girls.
Watson said he’s curious what’s behind the gender gap and is conducting followup research to try to figure out what’s going on.
One of the most puzzling aspects of the original study, he said, is how persistent the gender gap was.
Boys release different hormones into their mother’s system than girls. If that’s the cause of the memory gap, said Watson, you’d expect the gap to be much wider at some stages of pregnancy than others.
Instead, his study found the gap between “boy moms” and “girl moms” persisted from the first test, at eight weeks gestation, until months after delivery.
Which raises another, far more controversial possibility, said Watson: That carrying boys doesn’t necessarily make women smarter. Rather, smart women may be more likely to have boys.
Watson stresses he has no evidence yet to support this hypothesis—and said that, as a father of three daughters, he’s not personally advocating it.
But he notes that, in other species, it’s been shown that females can sometimes bias the sex of their children when having one gender or the other is an evolutionary advantage.
Whether humans might do the same, he said, is a “fascinating possibility.”
The possible reverse effect of motherhood
Having experienced baby brain firsthand, Galea sympathizes with women who worry being pregnant is making them dumber.
And she notes the research on the topic isn’t all discouraging.
For example, take those rats who fumbled their way around Galea’s mazes during pregnancy.
When Galea tests rats later in life, after their children have left the nest, they perform better than rats who’ve never had kids.
And other studies have suggested mother rats are less susceptible to degenerative brain illnesses like Alzheimer’s than non-mother rats.
No study has yet been done looking at the long-term effects of motherhood on the human brain.
But Galea can’t help but think that, if pregnancy impairs memory and cognition, the long-term mental effort involved in being a mother might actually do the opposite.
“When you’re a mom you’ve got to remember your kids’ doctor’s appointments, their dentist’s appointment, their shots,” she said.
“Before you were just taking care of yourself. Now you’re taking care of another human being.”
Study suggests link between abortion, mental health disorders
Patients showing signs of mood disorders, drug abuse should be screened
By Jen Skerritt, Vancouver Sun, May 1, 2010, p. B5
Depression and substance abuse plague about half of American women who reported having an abortion, according to a University of Manitoba study.
The study, published in the Canadian Journal of Psychology, suggests there’s an association between mental disorders and abortion and that doctors should screen for a history of abortion in women who present symptoms of anxiety, mood disorders and substance abuse.
However, researchers are adamant the findings do not conclude abortion causes mental disorders or drug abuse, saying the study did not examine other factors—including whether the mental disorder existed before a woman had an abortion.
The study analysed data collected from 3,310 women by the National Institute of Mental Health and the National Institute of Drug Abuse in the U.S. between 2001 and 2003.
Layperson interviewers asked women if they ever had an abortion in their lifetime, and used guidelines from the World Health Organization to assess such mental conditions as major depression, suicide, alcohol abuse and panic attacks.
Researchers found drug and alcohol abuse was more prevalent among women who reported having an abortion sometime in their life. About 25 per cent of women who had an abortion reported some form of substance abuse in their lifetime, compared to seven per cent of women who did not have abortions.
The study also found women who had an abortion had an increased likelihood of mood and anxiety disorders, although the relation is weaker and less consistent. Researchers speculate other factors, such as violence and poor social supports, may contribute to mental disorders.
Natalie Mota, a U of M graduate student who was the study’s primary author, said the findings are unclear.
“You absolutely cannot say from this data that an abortion causes mental illness. There’s an association present, but whether the mental illness comes before or after needs to be further examined.”
The study did not examine what portion of the abortions were medically necessary or elective, and said “unintended pregnancy itself may be a stressful event that can be a confounding factor in the relation between abortion and mental illness.”
Mota speculates the connection between substance abuse and abortion was strong because it’s possible that women self-medicate with drugs and alcohol following an abortion, although the study did not investigate this.
Mota said it’s important the study is not misinterpreted, and that people understand researchers found an “association” between mental disorders and abortions, not a “cause and effect” relationship.
“There is a possibility the person was diagnosed with a mental disorder and 20 years passed and they had an abortion,” Mota said.
Abortion providers worry the study’s findings could be misinterpreted and become fodder for anti-abortion groups.
“I think there are lots and lots of questions about this study and I would like to see some answers to those before I know it has any affect as an abortion provider and the way I provide my service,” said Joan Dawkins, executive director of the Women’s Health Clinic in Winnipeg.
Vision centres of blind person’s brain recycled to help other senses
By Thandi Fletcher, Vancouver Sun April 28, 2010, p. B 3
Despite popular belief, blind people don’t have a better sense of smell than people with sight, a Canadian study suggests.
University of Montreal graduate student Mathilde Beaulieu-Lefebvre debunked the myth that blind people have a more acute sense of smell, finding instead they simply are more conscious of odours around them.
“The urban legend is not true,” Beaulieu-Lefebvre said.
It’s not their sense of smell that’s different, but rather the way blind people use their noses, she said. For example, while a sighted person can simply look at food and tell if it’s gone bad, a blind person relies solely on smell to recognize good food from spoiled food.
“In the absence of vision, [blind people] have to rely on other cues, like smell or sound,” Beaulieu-Lefebvre said.
However, the study did find that blind people process odour information in their brains differently from sighted people.
Using a type of MRI scan, the researchers discovered that when blind people smell something, they use the part of the brain connected to the nose more than other people. They also found that—despite having lost their sense of vision—blind people still use the occipital cortex, the part of the brain used for vision.
“This part of the brain is sort of recycled to do tasks other than vision, such as smelling or touching or hearing,” explained Beaulieu-Lefebvre.
The study’s findings can help researchers better understand how the human brain works, Beaulieu-Lefebvre said.
“This gives hope to blind people in understanding that the brain is not hardwired,” she said. “It can be reorganized to do different tasks.”
The research can also help to develop a rehabilitation program for the blind, where they can learn how to navigate through an environment based on smell, she said.
Mike Potvin, who lost his vision at 25 to a rare hereditary disorder called Leber’s optic neuropathy, is not surprised by the study’s findings.
Beaulieu-Lefebvre will be presenting her findings in June at a conference for the Organization for Human Brain Mapping.
