Chips, Fries, Soda Most to Blame for Long-Term Weight Gain

(HealthDay News) -- The edict to eat less and exercise more is far from far-reaching, as a new analysis points to the increased consumption of potato chips, French fries, sugary sodas and red meat as a major cause of weight gain in people across the United States.

Inadequate changes in lifestyle factors such as television watching, exercise and sleep were also linked to gradual but relentless weight gain across the board.

Data from three separate studies following more than 120,000 healthy, non-obese American women and men for up to 20 years found that participants gained an average of 3.35 pounds within each four-year period -- totaling more than 16 pounds over two decades. Read more...

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Gene Variant May Raise Death Risk After Heart Bypass

(HealthDay News) -- People who carry a certain genetic variant involved in blood clotting and inflammation have a lower five-year survival rate after coronary artery bypass surgery, researchers report.

The findings should be used to better treat and ensure the survival of these surgical patients over the long-term, said the research team from Duke University Medical Center in Durham, N.C.

"There are possibilities that we could apply this information someday to a patient's prognosis, and for careful monitoring or increased surveillance if a person has a 2.5 times higher risk of dying, instead of letting them go their way after a CABG [coronary artery bypass graft] surgery," study senior author Mihai Podgoreanu, an assistant professor of anesthesiology, said in a Duke news release. Read more...

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1 hot brain pic > 1k words ?

Pretty pictures of brains with some parts lit up: Do they convince us that scientific results are real? Do they convince us more than text or bar graphs? McCabe and Castel ask these questions in their 2008 article "Seeing is Believing".

(The above is not an actual figure. It was pirated mercilessly from a paper unrelated to this post by yours truly.)

Last Wednesday, Dr. Karen Rommelfanger presented McCabe and Castel's paper at the first meeting of a new journal club hosted by the Neuroethics Program at the Emory Center for Ethics. Karen began by talking about how pervasive those pretty pictures of brains have become. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) seems to be everywhere (a good introduction to how it works can be found here). Some companies, such as Cephos ("The science behind the truth") and NoLieMRI (who make up for their lack of a snappy slogan with their rhyming name), claim to use fMRI scanners as giant lie detectors, while other companies promise that they can use neuroimaging and related techniques to help with marketing.

To get the conversation going, Karen showed us a video on the use of fMRI for lie detection from Dateline NBC that's embedded in the front page of the Cephos website. The story featured Cephos client Ed Hook, who turned to the company to prove to his wife that he was no longer lying to her about how many times he had cheated on her. We found it hard not to laugh at some of the statements Cephos founder Dr. Steven Laken made to the couple after Hook's session in the scanner. For instance, he told Hook, "Our conclusion is that you were telling the truth ... on having only four affairs." Can fMRI really help this marriage? Then we thought about how we would have reacted to the story if we weren’t graduate students, paid humble stipends to spend all day engaged in critical thinking, and we stopped laughing. As noted by the impeccably-dressed Comparative Lit student at the journal club, this was one of the more telling lines from the reporter's voice-over: "...this new type of lie detector is considered more scientific than the old polygraph test, because it relies on computers, and not subjective humans, to ask the questions and determine the results."

Of course, computers are just subjective as the humans that run them, but the results of an MRI scan suggest otherwise. There's something about scrolling through layers of your own brain that implies that massive number crunching has been done, beyond the reach of human bias. I'm not an expert, but I believe it's better to stay skeptical about fMRI lie detection. And I'm not the only one. Mallory Bowers, a Neuroscience grad student in the Ressler lab, pointed out during the journal club that the brain scans run by companies like Cephos are experiments with an n of 1. Others added that the results of these experiments aren’t peer reviewed. Instead, they’re reviewed by the people that run the companies, who have everything to gain from giving their customers whatever results the customers want. Orion Kiefer, an MD/PhD student in Neuroscience, countered this line of thought with the observation that any number of news shows must be dying to show that fMRI lie detection is just as unreliable as polygraph tests have been shown to be. Surely, if fMRI lie detection didn’t work, some hard-nosed reporter or a contrarian member of a skeptics’ society would have already put himself or herself on the patient’s table and proved it, right? Just to be sure, maybe some Neuroscience Program students should take a field trip to NoLie fMRI.

Whatever the quality of the science behind the brain scans, and whatever the results are used for, there remains the question of whether people are influenced by the way the data from these experiments is presented. Maybe companies like Cephos succeed, in part, because of how convincing the results of an fMRI scan seem. The journal club moved on to the paper by McCabe and Castel with these thoughts in mind. To test the idea that the way data from brain scans is presented can affect the credibility of the results, McCabe and Castel asked undergraduates at Colorado State University to read fictitious press-release-like articles reporting the results of brain imaging studies. Lo and behold, they found that an image of a brain scan accompanying the article increased scores on the statement, "The scientific reasoning in the article made sense". For the article "Watching TV is Related to Math Ability," the score crept from around 2.70 to about 2.85 -- a significant difference -- when the article either included a brain scan image instead of a bar graph or did not include an image (on their questionnaire, 2.5 was halfway between "agree" and "disagree").

McCabe and Castel concluded that brain images "provide a physical basis for abstract cognitive processes" that "[appeal] to people's affinity for reductionistic explanations of cognitive phenomena." I didn't know people had that kind of affinity. I thought people still bristled at the thought of being reduced to the product of a pile of neurons. If I were going to pick any group of people that would be likely to agree that a study is scientifically sound because an article about it includes images of brain scans, I would pick some undergraduates (and I include my former undergraduate self in that blanket generalization). The problem of Psychology departments’ dependence on undergrads for their results is well known, though, so let's not blame McCabe and Castel for it. Another issue was that their effect size was small, which the authors recognize, but I'm not sure how they could have improved that. They point to "pre-experimental exposure" to brain scan images, which could have influenced the subjects' responses. Clearly, we need to hurry up and clone us some neanderthals, and get one of them in to the MRI machine so we can test a population that hasn't been exposed to fMRI images.

Maybe more surprising than McCabe and Castel's results is their discussion of the implications. They seem to think that there could be some positives. For instance, increased awareness of cognitive neuroscience might result in more funding. They also observe that many have called for neuroscientists to be more involved with the dissemination of data. This paper is from 2008, and since then the need for neuroscientists to be able to translate their results to the public has only increased. The challenge is coming up with a "two-minute elevator talk" version of the caveats involved with interpreting fMRI data. How do you explain to your grandma why she should be skeptical about press releases claiming that fMRI can help political campaigns to target swing voters? We also agreed that there could be a bright side to all this belief in the power of the brain scan. It was pointed out that brain scans provide positive proof of mental disorders, and may help family members accept that their loved ones suffer from a legitimate mental condition, and in this way reduce the stigma.

The first meeting of the journal club was a success. Being graduate students, we all enjoyed the free food (pizza from Domino's—maybe a neuromarketer could tell us why we liked it so much). Many of the people at the first meeting were neuroscience graduate students (Emory NSP represent) and members of the Center for Ethics -- we would love to have more people from outside the field at future meetings. We did have one Comparative Literature grad student, who made the rest of us feel ashamed for not wearing a vest, as well as a librarian from Psychology, and the Director of the Center for Mind Brain and Culture, Dr. McCauley. In addition, there was a giant lazy susan in the middle of the conference room table that I won't mention again, as well as some important people whose names I don't know yet. Feel free to join us next month when medical ethicist and philosopher, Dr. John Banja, presents his paper "Virtue Essentialism, Prototypes, and the Moral Conservative Opposition to Enhancement Technologies: A Neuroethical Critique." Dr. Banja is an engaging speaker and it promises to be interesting. It would be even more interesting if you are of a morally-conservative bent and came ready to debate. Prep for it by asking yourself if you are for or against enhancement technologies. I'll be there, enhanced by espresso (Karen would like me to remind you that the Center for Ethics provides free coffee for students and visitors), unless I forget to put a reminder in my Gmail calendar, or my iPhone dies, leaving me without access to Google Maps, which I depend on to find my way to the Center for Ethics (because of my hippocampal injury).

--David Nicholson

graduate student, Sober lab

Emory Neuroscience Program

Metabolic Syndrome May Raise Risk of Peripheral Artery Disease

(HealthDay News) -- Women with metabolic syndrome are at high risk of developing peripheral artery disease, a condition that dramatically raises the risk of heart disease and stroke.

Using data on more than 27,000 women taking part in the Women's Health Study, researchers identified participants with metabolic syndrome, a collection of symptoms including abdominal obesity, high blood pressure, low HDL ("good") cholesterol, high triglyceride levels and insulin resistance.

Women were considered to have metabolic syndrome if they had three or more of those symptoms.

Women with metabolic syndrome had a 62 percent increased risk of developing peripheral artery disease (PAD) compared to those without metabolic syndrome. Each metabolic syndrome symptom raised the risk of PAD by 20 percent, the study found.

About 8 million Americans have peripheral artery disease, which typically affects the arteries in the pelvis and legs. Symptoms include cramping and pain or tiredness in the hip muscles and legs when walking or climbing stairs, although not everyone who has PAD is symptomatic. The pain usually subsides during rest. Read more...

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Now about this brain business

On the Neurobusiness Group website the text,"Amygdala activation can tell us from first impression whether leaders are profitable or have greater leadership ability," is displayed at the bottom of a picture of a faceless man in a well-tailored business suit. He is standing in a ready position, tie blowing in the wind, in front of a backdrop of expansive monochromatic blue mountains. He is back-lit by sunlight, and a laser beam of light slices through the sky as if to grant him special other-worldly gifts from the heavens. The perspective is set so that you feel you are below looking up to him, as you aspire to be him, from a lower (management) position. And perhaps the most clever detail is that the man's face isn't well-defined sending the message that, "This could be your face. You can be this guy with high amygdala activation foretelling exceptional leadership ability above those with low amygdala activation."

Below the described image is also a reference to this 2011 article: "Face value: amygdala response reflects the validity of first impressions." Neuroimage (2011) 54: 734-41.

The study consisted of 16 undergraduates ages 18-23. Nine of the participants were male and seven were female. The participants were told to evaluate the symmetry of the grayscale photos of current CEOs of Fortune 1000 companies while in the scanner. After scanning, students were asked to guess the success of the CEOs featured in the photos. Aside from being a very small sampling of a very specific demographic, the scans show correlations of the subjects brain activity during the task of evaluating face symmetry, not guessing the success of the CEOs (which was done outside of the scanner). This is a correlation of a correlation followed by a great leap to a conclusion: Seeing this pattern of brain activation wields a powerful predictive power that could (and maybe should) impact future hiring.

An obvious concern is over-interpreting the data this way is how this could lead to potential discrimination in hiring processes. Others, however, see this as a opportunity to create the optimal "business brain."

A recent article in the Atlanta Business Chronicle titled, "Author uncovers secrets of brain optimization" reviews the book, "Your Brain and Business" by CEO of the NeuroBusiness Group and "neuro-coach" Srinivasan Pillay, M.D. Dr. Pillay explains in his book that he utilized magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to measure how "brain function can be applied to the business environment" and attributes the virtues of "positive thinking" to the "business brain."

While neuroscience data may provide compelling data-based hypotheses for cognitive function and behavior, the application of neuroscience data and convincing nature of the physical representation of brain images must be critically evaluated in their broader utility. The impact of neuroscience data on general audiences has been evaluated empirically by McCabe and Castel's 2008 article in the journal Cognition: "Seeing is believing: the effect of brain images on judgments of scientific reasoning" as well as by Weisberg et al., 2008: "The seductive allure of neuroscience explanations". In sum, including neuroscience data, especially colorized pictures of brain, makes fictitious text and nonsensical text more convincing to non-experts, even over-riding direct criticism in the form of text from experts. This is not to say that neuroscience should only be for neuroscientists, but non-neuroscientists need to be able to understand the actual value and implications of such work.

We need to ask ourselves, "Why would neuroscience data be needed to convince business (wo)men that being 'solution-focused' vs. 'problem-focused' would help them become more successful?" Or "Why would brain images provide more evidence that 'emotions are a vital part of intelligence' especially when the definition of intelligence still eludes scientists and finding adequate measures of intelligence is an ongoing area of research?" The appeal of this book seems to reflect a sentiment expressed by Henry David Thoreau: "Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them." Do we (should we) have a revived sense of control of our lives by knowing the inner-workings of our brains (An interesting study might be to ask business leaders how neuroscience data might influence the ways they choose to interact with colleagues and clients)? This is not to judge the success Pillay has as a business coach, or to say that all of his techniques are not valuable (I'd be interested in seeing metrics of successful students of Pillay's neuro-coaching which includes companies such as Novartis, Genzyme, and The World Bank as well as individuals at PepsiCo, Coca Cola, Volkswagen, and Fidelity Investments). After all, who wouldn't feel empowered by encouraging, some might say spiritual, statements such as this one shared in his book, "The secret to living life successfully is to recognize that you can be different from what is happening to you." My concern is that the data that Pillay cites in his book (and his company's website) may not be as generalizable as he posits. The danger being that overgeneralizing the utility of neuroscience data represented in brain images corrupts the moral authority society has given to neuroscientists and puts society at larger risk to abuse and misuse neuroscience findings in contexts such as for lie detection, criminal evidence or testimony, and making hiring decisions. Two ideas about functional MRI data must be noted. 1. Data acquired in the functional MRI scanner are correlated to the scanned subject's brain activity during the experimental task. The data cannot necessarily accurately describe past or future behaviors. 2. No one part of the brain has exclusive rights to a thought or action. The brain acts in concert, and as I've once heard described, thoughts and actions from the brain are harmonies created by an orchestrated act of the brain. You cannot have a harmony with a single note (or single brain region for that matter). Brain images paint an overly simplified one-to-one causal relationship for general audiences that truly undermine the actual complexity of the brain. There is not one neuroscientist who could tell you at this time how the function of a brain cell translates into a thought or positive thinking or imagination. While neuroscientists and general audiences alike are enthusiastic about revealing the full spectrum of the brain and it's role in human experience, we must remember fMRI data are not so much mechanistic information, but correlations. In the case of neuro-coaching and business, brain imaging data is being expected to deliver more than it can at this time. While we have embraced the journey of this whole brain business, we are still at the beginning of a long road ahead.

--Karen S. Rommelfanger, PhD

Neuroethics Program, Center for Ethics

Recommended reading:

Trends in Cognitive Sciences. 2011 May;15(5):200-9. Understanding complexity in the human brain. Bassett DS, Gazzaniga MS

Cognition. 2008 Apr; 1079(1): 343-52. Seeing is believing: the effect of brain images on judgments of scientific reasoning.* McCabe DP, Castel AD * This article was discussed at Emory's Neuroethics Journal Club 19 Albany Law Journal of Science & Technlogy 205 (2009) Using fMRI as a Lie Detector - Are We Lying to Ourselves? Brain Reese

Post-doctoral position in Bioethics/Neuroethics at the University of Geneva

An amazing opportunity to do postdoctoral research in neuroethics in Switzerland!

Post-doctoral position in Bioethics/Neuroethics

The Institute for Biomedical Ethics at the University of Geneva Medical School in Switzerland is opening one post-doctoral position in bioethics. This position is funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation.

Within the project ENABLE - Protecting Vulnerable Persons in Health Care (supervisor: Samia Hurst), the successful candidate’s work will explore characteristics identified by moral psychology and the neurosciences that may have an impact on vulnerability in clinical care. The successful applicant will have a PhD or equivalent degree, and relevant research experience in a discipline related to neuroethics. Familiarity with experimental and normative literature on moral psychology, cognitive and affective neurosciences, and ethics will be an asset. This is a research position, with protected time for the post-doctoral fellow’s own research and many opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration. Duration for this position is two years, starting at the earliest on January 1rst 2012. Salary is according to the University of Geneva scale (post-doc, 100%, approx. 70’000 CHF per annum the first year).

Applicants should send a CV, letter of motivation including a brief (maximum one page) summary of your past research, a sample of published or submitted work, and two letters of recommendation to Samia.hurst@unige.ch

Deadline for applications is November 1rst 2011. Interviews will be conducted in November 2011.

For more information, contact: Prof. Samia Hurst Institute for Biomedical Ethics CMU/1 rue Michel Servet 1211 Genève 4 Switzerland Email : samia.hurst@unige.ch

All-Natural Fruit Juices are Not as Healthy as You Think

Preschoolers who are already on the heavy side and drink one to two sweet drinks a day might be at greater risk of becoming obese. Some of these sweet drinks include Kool-Aid with sugar and all-natural apple juice. This finding might come as a surprise to parents who make a point of buying fruit drinks without added sugars for their children.

Nutritionists and the new U.S. dietary guidelines both agree on the same recommendation: It is better to eat whole fresh fruit than to consume fruit juice.

Research revealed that 3- and 4-year-olds who carried extra weight and consumed one to two sweet drinks a day were at double the risk of becoming seriously overweight one year later.

In order to study the effects of sweet drinks researchers followed over 10,000 Missouri children who were divided into three groups: normal and underweight, those at risk of becoming overweight and those who were already overweight. Read more...

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9/11 Memories and Neuroscience

What to “do” with a post-9/11 world?

As part of the opening 9/11 events at Emory there was an excellent panel discussion on memorialization moderated by the Center for Ethics, Dr. Edward Queen and led by ILA’s Dr. Angelika Bammer, and Psychology’s Dr. Marshall Duke, as well as his brother, Mike Duke, a survivor of the World Trade Center attack.

After Mike Duke shared the powerful story of his experience on 9/11, Dr. Marshall Duke said that, according to his studies, the sharing of 9/11 narratives have helped people expand their range of possibility, and perhaps the possibility or faith that good things can happen even after tragedy. Sharing “oscillating narratives,” as Dr. Duke put it, wherein both positive and negative narratives inform family histories, were healthier overall for an individual’s ability to cope in life.

Dr. Bammer expressed concern that in the post-9/11 world we have gained a reinforcement and cultivation of fear, an ever-growing powerful feeling of an “us vs. them” mentality.

One student from the audience, who was 16 when the bombing took place, asked what he should do with his knowledge of the bombing and the post-9/11 experience. Or specifically, where should he put “it” and what should he do with “it.”

When thinking about memorialization, we can re-examine the purpose of memory. From a biological standpoint, memory’s primary purpose is for learning.

I can give an example from my career as a Parkinson’s disease neuroscientist. The movement disturbances that occur in Parkinson’s disease are due to the death of a specific region in the brain. The peculiar thing about Parkinson’s Disease is that the symptoms don’t become apparent, arguably you wouldn’t even know you had Parkinson’s Disease, until 80% of those neurons are gone—so what is happening before that 80% is lost? 

Some studies have suggested that your brain and your body “learn” to work with fewer cells. In this case, learning requires two processes: un-learning (essentially forgetting), and re-learning. Re-learning here means un-learning to produce movements with 100% of functioning brain cells and re-learning how to produce movements with a dwindling supply. 

Others suggest that a consequence of losing 80% of those brain cells in that region is the inability to produce electrical patterns in brain cells that are associated with both learning (heightened sustained electrical activity) and un-learning (depressed electrical activity). Essentially, when you can no longer forget, you can no longer learn.

This is not to say we need to forget the horrible tragedy that happened 10 years ago, but maybe it’s not necessary to hold onto and cultivate the fear of that day. How do we learn from a tragedy like 9/11? A wiser person than me (and if you know who penned this please let me know) once said: The ordinary person prays that bad things won't happen to them; the wise person prays for courage when they do.

The idea is not to perpetuate a theater of fear, but to reinforce thinking that reminds us to not be afraid. After 9/11, we saw remarkable resilience in communities. We were told stories (featured in the popular media as Dr. Bammer mentioned) that reminded us that we were not so different from those around us. We could appreciate the same qualities that others missed and cherished in their loved ones. We were reminded that we were all patriots, but we also should’ve been reminded of something much bigger—that’s we’re a product of all of our relationships and we are not really ever alone. Instead of heralding a culture of American individualism, maybe it should’ve been a time to herald the value of the inextricable interdependence of our relationships.

Some try to interpret the events of 9/11 as only being about the fragility of life and that memorialization and ritual should help us rebuild a world where we feel “safe,” back to “the good old days” when we knew what to expect. But this is a failing logic that celebrates the theater of fear that has reduced America to a spectacle. Instead I would invite a mediation on the following sentiment, one shared both by Zen philosophers and Ancient Greek philosophers alike: “You can never step in the same river twice.” Life is dynamic, impermanent, and ever-changing. Perhaps the one thing we can embrace throughout these changes, both literally and figuratively, is each other. 

To answer the student’s question: What to do with the knowledge gained from living in a post 9/11 world? I suggest we choose to be the wise person and choose to not be afraid.

---Karen S. Rommelfanger, PhD

Emory Center for Ethics, Neuroethics Program

Obese People at Higher Risk of Infection After Colon Surgery

(HealthDay News) -- Obese patients are at a significantly increased risk for surgical site infections after undergoing partial or full removal of the colon, a new study finds.



It included 7,020 patients, aged 18 to 64, who had either partial or total colectomy for colon cancer, diverticulitis or inflammatory bowel disease between 2002 and 2008. Of those patients, 1,243 were obese.



The overall rate of surgical site infections was 10.3 percent, but the rate was higher in obese patients (14.5 percent) than in non-obese patients (9.5 percent). After adjusting for a number of factors, the researchers calculated that obese patients were 60 percent more likely to develop surgical site infections than non-obese patients.



The average cost of colectomy for all the patients was $16,399, but the average cost for obese patients was about $295 more than for non-obese patients.



The researchers also found that surgical site infections greatly increased the cost of the procedure. The average total cost for patients who developed surgical site infections was $31,933, compared to $14,608 for patients without infection. Read more...



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Announcing the Neuroethics Scholars Program @ Emory University

Are you interested in the ethical and social implications of neuroscience and neurotechnology?

The Neuroethics Program of the Emory Center for Ethics is proud to announce the Neuroethics Scholars Program. The program is open to graduate students in any discipline who want to develop their interests at the intersection of neuroscience and ethics.

Deadline for applications: October 15, 2011

Sponsored by the Emory Center for Ethics and its Neuroethics Program, and funded by the Emory Neurosciences Initiative, the Neuroethics Scholars Program is an unprecedented opportunity for Emory graduate studentsto become active in the national Neuroethics community.

Graduate students are invited to propose collaborative or independent projects of interest to them, which could include areas such as:

• Developing Neuroethics curricula and co-teaching Neuroethics topics in both academic and public arenas
• Developing and executing interdisciplinary empirical Neuroethics research projects
• Developing and implementing New Media projects to promote awareness of Neuroethics topics and public outreach
• Exploring the application of neurotechnology in political, social, educational, or health arenas.

Applications with new and innovative ideas that challenge the boundaries of Neuroethics are strongly encouraged.

Support:

Scholarship support is $4000 per year and can be used to supplement current stipends with the approval of the student’s mentor or Division Graduate Supervisor (DGS).

For more information, please visit our website.

David Eagleman visiting Decatur Book Festival

Dr. David Eagleman, neuroscientist and New York Times best-selling author, will be attending AJC's Decatur Book Festival this Sunday, Sept 4 as part of his book tour on "Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain." Dr. Karen Rommelfanger a neuroscientist from the Center for Ethics, Neuroethics Program at Emory University will be introducing Dr. Eagleman.

Dr. Eagleman is the director of Baylor College of Medicine’s Initiative on Neuroscience and Law. The website is cleverly named "neulaw.org" reflecting the idea that neuroscience may inform new practices in law that reduce recidivism and emphasize rehabilitation--something he calls "Rational Sentencing." Essentially, he believes, "You are your brain," and by using neurorehabilitation, he promotes a "libertarian sentencing" where criminals can rehabilitate themselves.

A video of Dr. Eagleman speaking about neurolaw can be viewed below.



A video of Dr. Eagleman speaking about his book, Incognito, can be view below.

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