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AUTISM FIRST STEPS
AUTISM DAILY NEWSLETTER
Saturday, December. 1, 2001
INDEX:
* IFMAD: Seroquel Adjunctive Therapy Offers
Significant Benefits Over
Mood Stabilisation Monotherapy
* Corporate Profile for Association of Regional
Center Agencies
* Scientists
Turn Stem Cells Into Brain Cells
* Brain Cells Imaged As They Form Connections: A
First
* Defenseless
to fight back
******************************
IFMAD: Seroquel Adjunctive Therapy Offers Significant
Benefits Over Mood Stabilisation Monotherapy
MONTE
CARLO, MONACO -- November 29, 2001 -- Results from a first-ever controlled
study evaluating efficacy and safety of antipsychotic treatment in adolescent
bipolar disorder demonstrate that adding the atypical antipsychotic Seroquel
(quetiapine) to mood stabilisation therapy is significantly more effective than
mood stabilisation alone.
The data, presented today at the 2nd International Forum on Mood and Anxiety
Disorders (IFMAD) in Monte Carlo, highlight that mood stabilisation monotherapy
is often not enough to treat the symptoms of this illness, and adding
quetiapine to existing treatment would benefit a high percentage of young
patients.
Conducted by Professor Melissa DelBello, MD of the University of Cincinnati
College of Medicine, United States, the study1 evaluated efficacy of quetiapine
and divalproex as combination therapy, to divalproex monotherapy in adolescents
with bipolar disorder. It found the quetiapine group to be significantly more
effective in reducing symptoms in significantly more patients, than divalproex
alone. Additionally, quetiapine was shown to be exceptionally well-tolerated by
the adolescent patients.
"These results are extremely important and exciting as this is the first
time a controlled study evaluated efficacy and safety of antipsychotic
treatment in adolescents with bipolar disorder," commented Professor
DelBello. "Our findings indicate that adding quetiapine to divalproex
reduces psychotic symptoms in significantly more patients - statistically
speaking - with this traumatic illness, than divalproex monotherapy. This is
very encouraging, as nearly half of adolescents with bipolar disorder fail to
respond to initial treatment with lithium or divalproex monotherapy."
"Our study also showed quetiapine to be exceptionally
well-tolerated," continued Professor DelBello, "causing no treatment
emergent extrapyramidal symptoms (EPS). These distressing and disabling
movement disorders can occur as side effects and often lead to treatment
non-compliance. What our data suggests is that not only can we increase chances
of a successful recovery, but we can do so without subjecting our young
patients to these devastating side effects."
The double-blind, placebo-controlled study randomised use of quetiapine (mean
dose: 432mg/day) versus placebo in combination with divalproex, in 30
adolescent patients with bipolar disorder (mean age: 14 years) for six weeks.
The results indicated that 87 percent of the quetiapine combination patient
group had a 50 percent or greater reduction in YMRS scores from baseline to
study conclusion, compared to only 53 percent in the divalproex monotherapy
group. Furthermore, 86 percent of the quetiapine combination group showed
improvement in CGI scores, compared to 53 percent in the divalproex monotherapy
group. The quetiapine combination patient group did not experience any EPS, QTc
prolongation or weight gain.
Since Seroquel is already an efficacious and well-tolerated treatment for schizophrenia,
this news is encouraging for adolescents suffering from bipolar disorder.
Reference:
1DelBello MP, Rosenberg HL, Wilhoit SR, Seshadri V, Strakowski SM. Safety,
tolerability and efficacy of quetiapine as adjunctive treatment for bipolar
adolescents with mania. Poster presented at 2nd International Forum on Mood and
Anxiety Disorders, Monte Carlo, Monaco.
SOURCE: AstraZeneca
http://www.docguide.com/dgc.nsf/RegisterGE?OpenForm&code=webfeed
******************************
Corporate Profile for Association of Regional Center
Agencies, dated Nov. 30, 2001
Updated: Fri, Nov 30 6:01 AM EST
(BUSINESS WIRE) - The following Corporate Profile is available for inclusion in
your files. News releases for this client are distributed by Business Wire and
also become part of the leading databases and online services, including all of
the leading Internet-based services. Published Date: Nov. 30, 2001Company Name:
Association of Regional Center AgenciesAddress: 915 L Street, Suite
1050Sacramento, CA 95814Main TelephoneNumber: 916/446-7961Internet HomePage
Address(URL): www.arcanet.orgChief
ExecutiveOfficer: Robert BaldoChief FinancialOfficer: Robert BaldoInvestor
RelationsBusiness number: 916/446-7961Public RelationsContact: Christina
JohnsonBusiness number: 916/446-7961E-mail address: johnsonc@arcanet.orgIndustry:
Developmental disabilitiesCompany Description: The Association of Regional
Centers (ARCA) represents 21 regional centers in California that provide
services to more than 176,000 Californians with developmental disabilities.
Regional centers are non-profit organizations that contract with the state
Department of Developmental Services (DDS). This public-private non-profit
partnership results in the expenditure and monitoring of more than one billion
state and federal dollars for people with developmental disabilities and their
families.The function of the Association is to support the purpose, intent and
mandate of the Lanterman Developmental Disabilities Services Act. Located in
Sacramento, ARCA is an advocate, promoting action, legislation and public
policy on all matters affecting the well being of persons with developmental
disabilities and the prevention of developmental disabilities. Developmental
disabilities include mental retardation, epilepsy, cerebral palsy, autism and
related disorders.ARCA facilitates communication among members, conducts
research and analysis of issues related to California's developmental
disabilities service system and provides public information about developmental
disabilities and regional centers to the state and federal administrations, the
state Legislature, Congress, state and national advocacy providers, and various
consumer groups. ARCA is governed by a board of directors, made up of one
regional center board member from each regional center's board of directors and
the regional center's executive director. The Association has ten standing
committees, including finance, contract negotiating, strategic planning,
legislative and others to fulfill ARCA's responsibilities. In addition, ad hoc
task forces may be organized as needed.
http://news.excite.com/news/bw/011130/profile-ca-arca
*****************************
Scientists Turn Stem Cells Into Brain Cells
By Maggie Fox,
Health and Science CorrespondentWASHINGTON (Reuters) - Two separate teams of
international researchers said on Friday they had found reliable ways to coax
human embryonic stem cells into becoming brain cells.Their work is a step
forward in the busy but controversial field of stem cell research, which
scientists say holds the promise of treating a range of diseases from brain
damage to diabetes, but which critics say kills human embryos.Stem cells are a
kind of master cell that can develop into a variety of tissues. When taken from
very small embryos they seem to be even more flexible, with the ability to
become any kind of cell in the body at all.They also seem to live and grow
forever in lab dishes, unlike ``differentiated'' cells that have become skin
cells, muscle cells and so on, providing a potentially endless source of
tissue, and perhaps someday even organs, for transplant.Both teams, writing in
the journal Nature Biotechnology, said they coaxed the stem cells into becoming
the three types of brain cells -- astrocytes, oligodendrocytes and mature
neurons.They transplanted the cells into the brains of newborn mice and saw
them spread throughout the brains, take up residence and, evidently, start
working.They took stem cells from human embryos -- typically tiny balls of
cells left over from IVF or test-tube baby fertility treatments -- grew them in
special cultures in the laboratory and then injected them into the brains of
the mice.``These are the cells that will be used, ultimately, to treat
Parkinson's and other central nervous system disorders,'' Su-Chun Zhang of the University
of Wisconsin, who led one of the studies, said in a statement.They looked at
the mouse brains after a few weeks.``The neuron that we're seeing after
transplant is almost identical to what the neuron should be in the healthy
brain,'' Zhang said.``These transplanted cells had no experience in the brain,
and we wanted to see if they would mirror the development of the mouse brain,''
Zhang says. ``And they do.''STEM CELLS DIFFICULT TO ISOLATEBenjamin Reubinoff
and colleagues at Hadassah University Hospital in Jerusalem and Monash
University in Melbourne, Australia, reported similar results.Stem cells are
difficult to isolate and identify but it is even trickier to direct their
development. The particular mix of nurturing chemicals is vital.Zhang, James
Thomson and colleagues at Wisconsin, working with a team at the University of
Bonn in Germany, said one step involved starving tumors of a protein called
FGF-2.Sometimes transplanted embryonic stem cells can form tumors, but they did
not in these mice, the researchers said.``We put a lot of cells, in one
instance half a million, in a mouse,'' says Zhang. ``The more cells you put in,
the more likely you are to have a tumor. The absence of tumors shows our
methods for purifying the precursor cells are pretty good.''Stem cell
researcher Lorenz Studer of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York
said both papers offered insight into how stem cells might be harnessed.``The
list of diseases that may be treatable with human embryonic stem cell research
is vast and includes neurological disorders (such as) Parkinson's disease (news - web
sites), white-matter loss or spinal cord injury, and many non-central
nervous system disorders (such as) juvenile diabetes, muscular dystrophy or
cardiac dysfunction,'' Studer wrote in a commentary for Nature Biotechnology.In
a recent interview Curt Freed of the University of Colorado, who experiments
with brain cell transplants on Parkinson's patients, said he was looking for
such results.``As soon as a cell comes along that can be mass-produced it will
make brain cell repair much more predictable and reliable,'' Freed said.But he
warned that federal approval was a long way off. President Bush (news
- web
sites) also limited avenues for such research in August when he said
federally funded researchers could only work with currently existing supplies
of embryonic stem cells.``It will still be some years before we can even try
this in people,'' Zhang said.
http://ads.x10.com/yahoo/mmm_index.htm
******************************
Brain Cells Imaged As They Form Connections: A First
Scientists have
produced dramatic images of brain cells forming temporary and permanent connections
in response to various stimuli. They illustrate for the first time the
structural changes between neurons in the brain that, many scientists have long
believed, take place when we store short-term and long-term memories.
In a paper published in today's issue of the journal Cell, researchers
from the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) Divisions of Biology and
Physical Sciences describe their achievement, a "Holy Grail" for
neuroscientists, who have long sought concrete evidence for how nerve
connections in the brain are changed temporarily and permanently by our
experiences.
"The long-term memories stored in our brain last our entire lives, so
everybody had assumed that there must be lasting structural changes between
neurons in the brain," says Michael A. Colicos, a postdoctoral fellow at
UCSD and the lead author of the paper. "Although there's been a lot of
suggestive evidence to indicate that this is the case, it's never before been
directly observed."
"While most people assumed that some sort of rearrangement of nerve cell
connections took place in the brain, this was extremely difficult to
demonstrate experimentally," says Yukiko Goda, a professor of biology at
UCSD who headed the research team, which included Michael J. Sailor, a professor
of chemistry and biochemistry at UCSD, and Boyce E. Collins, a postdoctoral
fellow in Sailor's lab. "Some investigators saw increases in the number of
synapses in the brain in response to stimuli, while others saw no changes.
There are a billion synapses in a cubic centimeter of brain tissue, so no one
could tell for certain whether the statistical comparisons of synapse density
between one sample and another showed a real increase."
To resolve this problem, the UCSD researchers focused their attention on
individual nerve cells, specifically neurons from the hippocampus -- the
portion of the human brain crucial to forming particular types of memory -- and
filmed them as their synapses made new connections to other nerve cells in
response to electrical impulses.
The ability of the scientists to do this without impairing the normal
physiological functions of the cells depended on two new techniques implemented
in Goda's lab to study synaptic connections. One was a method of visualizing
the rods and filaments of actin -- the girders that make up the cytoskeleton,
the internal skeleton of the cell. Using molecular biology techniques,
fluorescent versions of actin were constructed and visualized as the neurons
grew and changed shape to establish new connections.
The second development, which resulted from a collaboration between Goda and
Sailor, was a method of stimulating nerve cells in a manner that mimicked their
stimulation in the brain. This involved using the "photoconductive"
properties of silicon in a way that allowed the researchers to deliver a short,
high frequency burst of electricity to a specific area of a neuron on a silicon
chip by simply shining light on that area. Light excitation in that area of the
silicon created a narrow pathway through which Colicos and his colleagues could
apply a tiny voltage below the chip to target the neuron.
"We stimulate these cells with a short, high-frequency burst," says
Colicos, working in Goda's lab. "That type of stimulation is what other
researchers believed for many years was the type that formed these connections
between neurons."
A key advantage of this method is that it doesn't damage the cell. "Part
of the reason people haven't been able to demonstrate this before is that the
technology hasn't been available to do this before," says Colicos.
"The standard way of stimulating a neuron is to use an electrode. But as
soon as you stab the cell with an electrode, it begins to die. So the advantage
of this new technique is that we can keep the cells in their physiologically
normal state. And when we stimulate the cells of our choice by shining light,
we can induce the actual structural changes that occur in the brain -- the
formation of these new synapses."
In their experiments, the UCSD researchers discovered that when they stimulated
a cell once, the actin inside the cell was activated and temporarily moved
toward neurons to which they were connected. The activity in the first cell
also stimulated the movement of actin in neighboring neurons, which moved away
from the activated cell. Those changes in the cells were temporary, however,
lasting for about three to five minutes and disappearing within five to 10
minutes.
"The short-term changes are just part of the normal way the nerve cells
talk to each other," says Colicos. "The long-term changes in the
neurons occur only after the neurons are stimulated four times over the course
of an hour. The synapse will actually split and new synapses will form,
producing a permanent change that will presumably last for the rest of your
life."
"The analogy to human memory is that when you see or hear something once,
it might stick in your mind for a few minutes. If it's not important, it fades
away and you forget it 10 minutes later. But if you see or hear it again and
this keeps happening over the next hour, you are going to remember it for a
much longer time. And things that are repeated many times can be remembered for
an entire lifetime."
"It's like a piano lesson," says Goda. "If you play a musical
score over and over again, it becomes ingrained in your memory."
In their experiments, which were financed in part by grants from the National
Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, the researchers
observed no changes in these newly formed nerve connections once they were
established, indicating that they were permanent.
"Once you take an axon and form two new connections, those connections are
very stable and there's no reason to believe that they'll go away," says
Colicos. "That's the kind of change one would envision lasting a whole
lifetime." - By Kim McDonaldRelated image:Image of neuron
showing actin formation in response to stimulation. Credit: Michael A. Colicos,
UCSD.RealPlayer videos:Overview
of experimental design, showing photoconductive stimulation of neurons on
silicon under microscope. Credit: Michael A. Colicos, UCSDNerve cell firing, illustrated by calcium
oscillations, in response to photoconductive stimulation. Credit: Michael A.
Colicos, UCSDIncreases in
actin within synapse of nerve cell that will form new connections with another
nerve cell. Credit, Michael A. Colicos, UCSD
[Contact: Michael Colicos, Yukiko Goda, Kim McDonald]
30-Nov-2001
http://unisci.com/stories/20014/1130011.htm
******************************
Defenseless to fight back
By Eileen McNamara, Globe Staff, 11/28/2001
here is nothing optional
about a federal court order, not even for the Massachusetts Legislature. <EMBED
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The oligarchy that rules Beacon Hill has no exalted standing in the courtroom
of US District Judge Douglas P. Woodlock, and that's where the state's
political leaders are headed if they continue to deny mandated services to
mentally retarded adults.In an action as legally and fiscally irresponsible as
it is morally indefensible, lawmakers last week deleted $22 million from the
state budget to fund residential placements and interim services for thousands
of people who have been denied their rights under federal Medicaid laws for
decades.These are retarded men and women, now deep into middle age, who have
been cared for at home by parents worried that they will soon be too old or too
infirm to feed, wash, and dress their dependent adult children. Three years
ago, those families filed a class action lawsuit against the Commonwealth,
arguing that the state had denied them services to which they were legally
entitled.To settle that suit, the state made a promise to those parents.
Earlier this year, it agreed to spend $114 million over five years to move
2,400 people into supervised group homes. The $22 million earmarked for the
fiscal year that began on July 1 was to be used to move 375 mentally retarded
adults into residential care and provide interim services for those who will be
moved in the next four years from their family homes.The Commonwealth cannot
now say ''never mind,'' or ''maybe later.''In anticipation of the promised
funding, 84 individuals have already been placed in group homes. In a memo to
his staff this week, Gerry Morrissey, commissioner of the Department of Mental
Retardation, offered a bleak assessment of the Legislature's handiwork. ''The
Department has already committed approximately $9.8 million of this
appropriation to cover approximately one-third of the new placements as well as
all of the interim family support services, and does not have $9.8 million
elsewhere in the budget. Eighty-four individuals who have already been placed
in FY02 would likely have the residential services provided under the agreement
taken away, requiring them in most instances to return home.''That is simply
unacceptable. ''These parents have done their job,'' notes Attorney General
Thomas F. Reilly, who helped broker the settlement. ''For 40 or 50 years, they
took care of their children at no expense to the state. They relied upon the
word of their government. We need to honor that commitment.''As a practical
matter, the Legislature's action makes no fiscal sense. Now is the best time
for the state to begin to redress its years of neglect. The federal government
reimburses half of all Medicaid outlays, so the actual cost to the state will
be only $11 million this fiscal year.The weakened economy is being used as a
rationale for any number of assaults on state aid to the needy this year, but
not even a recession justifies the subversion of a federal court agreement
negotiated with the Swift administration.In a supplemental budget being
prepared for submission to the Legislature later this week, Acting Governor
Jane Swift intends to ask for a restoration of $15 million to begin funding
this agreement. Lawmakers will reject it at their own peril. Two years ago,
when coffers were full and officials no more willing to fullfill their
obligations to these families, Woodlock called the footdragging ''bush league''
and ''outrageous.'' It's unlikely that the passage of time has made him more
patient.Neil V. McKittrick is the lawyer from Hill & Barlow who represents
the families in this case, without charge. If there is no supplemental budget,
McKittrick says, the state should take note of the prediction deep in
Morrissey's memo to his staff. ''Eliminating this appropriation,'' he wrote,
''will likely result in costly litigation.''Count on it, says McKittrick.Eileen
McNamara can be reached by e-mail at mcnamara@globe.com.This
story ran on page B1 of the Boston Globe on 11/28/2001.
© Copyright
2001 Globe Newspaper Company.
http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/332/metro/Defenseless_to_fight_back+.shtml
******************************
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