Emory-Tibet science project rolls out bridges to inner and outer worlds

Emory psychology professor Philippe Rochat, left, sparks a connection with the Dalai Lama during a panel discussion on ethics, as religion professor Wendy Farley looks on. Emory Photo/Video.

By Carol Clark

If you want to make a significant contribution for a better world, “take care of both the brain and the heart.” That was the overriding message of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Emory’s Presidential Distinguished Professor, during his recent visit to campus.

The Robert A. Paul Emory-Tibet Science Initiative (ETSI) is one way the Dalai Lama would like to incorporate that message into education. He presided over a luncheon celebrating the full implementation phase of the ETSI, an initiative started in 2007 to exchange knowledge between modern scientists and Tibetan monastics trained in ancient, contemplative methods of developing empathy, compassion and other beneficial mental states.

“The ETSI bridges two worlds that are too often separate: Science and the inner world of human values, beliefs and emotions,” said Robin Forman, dean of Emory College of Arts and Sciences. “His Holiness realizes that both hold great value.”

Emory faculty and Tibetan scholars collaborated to develop introductory Tibetan-English science textbooks in neuroscience, biology and physics, and to lead classes for Tibetan monastics. Nearly 100 monks and nuns have participated in the development phase of the ETSI. Last May, six Tibetan monks completed a three-year science instruction program at Emory, and they will now lead the teaching efforts back in India, the seat of the Tibetan diaspora, with the continued support of Emory science faculty. With funding from the Dalai Lama Trust and Emory College, 36 more monastic teachers will be trained at Emory over the next 10 years.

The first group of Tibetan monks to compete a three-year science-teaching program at Emory poses at commencement with Dean Robin Forman (standing, center), and Geshe Lobsang Tenzin Negi, director of the ETSI (in business suit). Emory Photo/Video.

“What a joyful experience it has been,” Forman said of the ETSI. He noted that the Tibetan monastics see a comprehensive science curriculum not as a threat to their Buddhist tradition, but as “a way of protecting, preserving, enhancing and even energizing their unique culture and civilization.”

The Dalai Lama called the large-scale implementation of the curriculum, set for 2014, as “the most critical phase.” The roll-out will include: The development of 19 high-level bilingual science textbooks; annual six-week intensives taught by international science faculty in three major monastic institutions in south India, with a total student body of more than 10,000; and year-round distance learning classes for monasteries and nunneries.

The ETSI grew out of the Emory Tibet Partnership, founded by Robert Paul, an Emory professor of anthropology and interdisciplinary studies, and Geshe Lobsang Tenzin Negi, a senior lecturer in Emory’s Department of Religion and director of the ETSI. Watch the video, below, to learn more about the ETSI formation:


So far, the ETSI has hosted five International Conferences on Science Translation into Tibetan and coined more than 2,500 new science terms for the language.

“Translation is one of the most important sources of knowledge for every evolving civilization,” said Tsondue Samphel, a member of the ETSI translation team. Samphel trained as a novice monk in Dharamsala, India, before returning to secular life and earning a physics degree from Emory in 2006.

Samphel described how translators played a role in bringing Buddhism from other countries to Tibet, and in helping the religion evolve into a form of Buddhism unique to the Himalayan kingdom.

“Now, more than 1,000 years later, another historic event is taking place,” Samphel said of the effort to promote the cross-fertilization of ancient Tibetan wisdom and modern scientific understanding. “This could advance the welfare of all humanity to a higher level."

Emory biologist Arri Eisen, center, says helping Tibetan monastics gain a scientific view of the world has made him a better teacher.

The cross-fertilization is already contributing to science discoveries at Emory. For instance, Cognitively Based Compassion Training, a secular meditation protocol based on Tibetan traditions, has demonstrated significant beneficial effects on immune and hormonal response to psychosocial stress among Emory undergraduate students. These promising research results led to an ongoing NIH-funded study on the health benefits of compassion training.

The ETSI “changed my life,” said Arri Eisen, a professor of biology, who is among the Emory faculty who has spent summers in India teaching the monastics. He said the experience of engaging in intense discussions with the monastics made him a better teacher.

Most of his Tibetan students do not have a goal of becoming a scientist. “They are learning science to help them understand Buddhism better, to make them better Buddhists, and to become more enriched citizens,” Eisen said.

“I’m representing just a small piece of the power of this thing,” he said. “This project has transformed me, it’s transformed many monks and nuns, and I think that’s just the beginning.”

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A taste of traditional Italian medicine

Medical Ethnobotanist Cassandra Quave collecting plant specimens in Italy.

By Carol Clark

“Ethnobotany is the science of survival,” Cassandra Quave told a group of Emory students when they visited her field research site in southern Italy recently.

Quave, a medical ethnobotantist with Emory’s Center for the Study of Human Health, is documenting the traditional ways that people use plants in the Vulture-Alto Bradano region of Basilicata province, a landscape of rolling hillsides dominated by the dormant volcano Monte Vulture. She is also collecting specimens of medicinal plants that she will take back to her Emory lab for her drug discovery research projects.

The students were in Italy this June as part of the “Italian and Medical Humanities” course, a collaboration of Emory’s Italian Studies Program, the School of Medicine, the Center for Ethics and the Center for the Study of Human Health.

Their itinerary included a day with Quave, who immersed the students in the local life of the village of Ginestra. She took them on a walk through the surrounding countryside, identifying the traditional medicinal uses of plants they encountered along the way. A fourth-generation shepherd told the students about pastoral life, and truffle hunters demonstrated how they use dogs to hunt these gourmet delicacies.

Cassandra Quave takes students off the beaten track, to learn about agrarian life.

“The students got to see first-hand how important traditional knowledge of environmental resources can be to a community,” Quave says. “It would be very difficult for these people to survive without it.”

During a visit to a vineyard, Quave made a point of having the students pick and eat ripe mulberries off a tree. “Today, especially in the U.S., people are very disconnected from their environment and food sources,” she says. “For many of the students, this was the first time that they had ever eaten anything that they had harvested themselves.”

Basilicata is home to the Arbereshe ethnic minority in Italy, the descendants of Albanians who fled the Ottoman invasion of Albania five centuries ago. “They have maintained their language, which is very different from modern-day Albanian, and adapted to a new environment, while still keeping some of their homeland traditions alive,” Quave says. “Unfortunately, many of these practices are in a state of rapid decline. The Arbereshe language is listed as an endangered language and as the language disappears, so does much of the culture.”

Quave currently has a $1.8 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to pursue her research into how an extract from the elm leaf blackberry, a tree common in forests across Europe, might help fight antibiotic-resistant staph. Click here to read more about her research.

Here are more photos of the students in Basilicata. 

Photos courtesy of Cassandra Quave.

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A wild view of medicine

What do chimpanzees, honey bees, wood ants and woolly bear caterpillars have in common? They all practice medicine without a license.

"These animals use medicines that they find in the environment they live in to fight their parasitic diseases," says Emory biologist Jaap de Roode. In a recent TedxEmory talk (see above video), de Roode describes recent findings about "animal doctors" in nature and the potential for humans to learn from them.

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Tibetan monks learn about science and 'riding shotgun'

Among the more than 4,200 graduates at Emory’s commencement were six Tibetan monks – the first group of monastics to complete a curriculum of modern science training at the behest of the Dalai Lama.

The Emory-Tibet Science Initiative aims to bring the best of Western science to the monastics, while sharing insights from Tibetan meditative practices with the Western world.

When they arrived on the Emory campus three years ago, the monks had little or no scientific training and limited English. Now the monks are returning to their monasteries in Dharamsala, India, to help teach other monks and nuns about biology, neuroscience, physics and math.

“We have a huge responsibility because we are the first to do this,” Lodoe Sangpo told the Atlanta Journal Constitution. “We must do as much as we can because this is His Holiness’ vision.”

Watch the video, above, to hear the monks describe their time at Emory, and some of their new favorite English words and phrases, like “riding shotgun.”

A new cohort of monks arrives at Emory in August for the ongoing program, which includes the creation of modern science textbooks in the Tibetan language.

The Dalai Lama himself returns to Emory in October. In addition to on-campus teaching and conversations with students, he will give two public talks at the Arena at Gwinnett Center.

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The growing buzz on animal self-medication

In addition to gathering pollen, honeybees collect plant saps to create a resinous material that reduces bacteria and parasite loads in hives. (Photo by Louise Docker/Wikipedia.)

By Carol Clark

Birds do it. Bees do it. Even forest-dwelling ants do it. Increasing evidence suggests that a wide range of animals self-medicate.

“We need to pay close attention to how animals may use plants or other materials as medicine, because it has direct implications for human health and food production,” says Emory biologist Jaap de Roode.

De Roode wrote a review of recent studies on self-medication in animals for the current issue of the journal Science. De Roode and his co-authors, Thierry Lefèvre and Mark Hunter, recently published their own study showing that monarch butterflies use toxins found in milkweed to cure themselves and their offspring of disease.

De Roode will also be giving a talk on animal self-medication on Saturday, April 20, as one of 11 speakers set for TEDxEmory.

Milkweed, left, is a pest to farmers, but medication to monarch butterflies. The insects use toxins in some species of the plant to kill parasites in their offspring. (iStockphoto.com)

Until a little more than a decade ago, de Roode notes, primates were among the only animals besides humans thought to have the capacity for self-medication. Chimpanzees, for instance, had been observed in the wild eating plants with anti-parasitic properties but with little or no nutritional value.

Then some birds were found to line their nests with plants that ward off parasites, fungi and other pathogens. Just last year, ecologists in Mexico published a study suggesting that house sparrows and finches may be studding their nests with cigarette butts because nicotine reduces mite infestations.

The evidence for self-medication is actually stronger for insects. It’s easier to conduct laboratory experiments on them, and to clearly demonstrate whether an insect’s preference for a certain food delivers a benefit to fitness and survival.

“It’s now clear that animals do not have to have a big brain or advanced cognitive skills to use medicine found in nature,” de Roode says. “We’re seeing that these behaviors can be innate.”

Emory biologist Todd Schlenke, for instance, recently found that when fruit flies sense parasitic wasps in their vicinity, they lay their eggs in an alcohol-soaked environment, forcing their larvae to consume booze as a drug to combat the deadly wasps. And the larvae themselves, given the choice, prefer to eat food high in alcohol if, and only if, they are infected with the wasp eggs. The alcohol treatment is highly effective, greatly improving the survival rate of infected larvae.

No one has researched the possibility of whether alcohol could have a similar effect on humans suffering from blood-borne parasites.

Fruit flies have evolved the capability to seek out alcohol to combat infections by parasitic wasps. (Photo by Andre Karwath/Wikipedia.)

De Roode notes that insects and other animals may hold many medicinal secrets of potential benefit to humans.

Honey bees, for example, make a sticky substance called propolis from plant resins and incorporate it into the architecture of their hives. This resinous material has been shown to reduce bacteria and parasite loads in hives. A recent study showed that bees exposed to the spores of fungal parasites increase their resin foraging rates, suggesting that making propolis may be a case of self-medication.

In the wild, honey bees line the entire interior of their hives with resin to create what is called the “propolis envelope.” Many commercial beekeepers, however, select for bees that don’t gather resinous material, because the substance gums up the manmade hive frames.

Meanwhile, honeybees in the United States are suffering from die-offs that have wiped out nearly half of the hives needed to pollinate fruits and vegetables in the country. Drought, pesticides, viruses and other pathogens have all been suggested as possible causes of the bee deaths.

Could discouraging a self-medicating trait in bees also be a contributing factor?

“Those are the kinds of questions that are important to look at and think about,” de Roode says.

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Fruit flies force their young to drink alcohol -- for their own good

The fruit fly study adds to the evidence "that using toxins in the environment to medicate offspring may be common across the animal kingdom," says biologist Todd Schlenke. 

By Carol Clark

When fruit flies sense parasitic wasps in their vicinity, they lay their eggs in an alcohol-soaked environment, essentially forcing their larvae to consume booze as a drug to combat the deadly wasps.

The discovery by biologists at Emory University is published in the journal Science.

“The adult flies actually anticipate an infection risk to their children, and then they medicate them by depositing them in alcohol,” says Todd Schlenke, the evolutionary geneticist whose lab did the research. “We found that this medicating behavior was shared by diverse fly species, adding to the evidence that using toxins in the environment to medicate offspring may be common across the animal kingdom.”

Adult fruit flies detect the wasps by sight, and appear to have much better vision than previously realized, he adds. “Our data indicate that the flies can visually distinguish the relatively small morphological differences between male and female wasps, and between different species of wasps.” 

The experiments were led by Balint Zacsoh, who recently graduated from Emory with a degree in biology and still works in the Schlenke lab. The team also included Emory graduate student Zachary Lynch and postdoc Nathan Mortimer.


Adult wasps are about to emerge from fruit fly pupae, above, after eating the fruit fly larvae from the inside out. Photo by Todd Schlenke.

The larvae of the common fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, eat the rot, or fungi and bacteria, that grows on overripe, fermenting fruit. They have evolved a certain amount of resistance to the toxic effects of the alcohol levels in their natural habitat, which can range up to 15 percent.

Tiny, endoparasitoid wasps are major killers of fruit flies. The wasps inject their eggs inside the fruit fly larvae, along with venom that aims to suppress their hosts’ cellular immune response. If the flies fail to kill the wasp egg, a wasp larva hatches inside the fruit fly larva and begins to eat its host from the inside out.

Last year, the Schlenke lab published a study showing how fruit fly larvae infected with wasps prefer to eat food high in alcohol. This behavior greatly improves the survival rate of the fruit flies because they have evolved high tolerance of the toxic effects of the alcohol, but the wasps have not.

“The fruit fly larvae raise their blood alcohol levels, so that the wasps living in their blood will suffer,” Schlenke says. “When you think of an immune system, you usually think of blood cells and immune proteins, but behavior can also be a big part of an organism’s immune defense.”


A female parasitic wasp, on the prowl for fruit fly larvae to inject with her eggs.

For the latest study, the researchers asked whether the fruit fly parents could sense when their children were at risk for infection, and whether they then sought out alcohol to prophylactically medicate them. 

Adult female fruit flies were released in one mesh cage with parasitic wasps and another mesh cage with no wasps. Both cages had two petri dishes containing yeast, the nourishment for lab-raised fruit flies and their larvae. The yeast in one of the petri dishes was mixed with 6 percent alcohol, while the yeast in the other dish was alcohol free. After 24 hours, the petri dishes were removed and the researchers counted the eggs that the fruit flies had laid.

The results were dramatic. In the mesh cage with parasitic wasps, 90 percent of the eggs laid were in the dish containing alcohol. In the cage with no wasps, only 40 percent of the eggs were in the alcohol dish.

“The fruit flies clearly change their reproductive behavior when the wasps are present,“ Schlenke says. “The alcohol is slightly toxic to the fruit flies as well, but the wasps are a bigger danger than the alcohol.”

The fly strains used in the experiments have been bred in the lab for decades. “The flies that we work with have not seen wasps in their lives before, and neither have their ancestors going back hundreds of generations,” Schlenke says. “And yet, the flies still recognize these wasps as a danger when they are put in a cage with them.”

Experiments showed that the flies are extremely discerning about differences in the wasps. They preferred to lay their eggs in alcohol when female wasps were present, but not if only male wasps were in the cage.


The adult female fruit flies only react to the presence of female wasps that infect fruit-fly larvae, above, and not to male wasps, or to other species of wasps that do not infect their larvae.

Theorizing that the flies were reacting to pheromones, the researchers conducted experiments using two groups of mutated fruit flies. One group lacked the ability to smell, and another group lacked sight. The flies unable to smell, however, still preferred to lay their eggs in alcohol when female wasps were present. The blind flies did not make the distinction, choosing the non-alcohol food for their offspring, even in the presence of female wasps.

“This result was a surprise to me,” Schlenke says. “I thought the flies were probably using olfaction to sense the female wasps. The small, compound eyes of flies are believed to be more geared to detecting motion than high-resolution images.”

The only obvious visual differences between the female and male wasps, he adds, is that the males have longer antennae, slightly smaller bodies, and lack an ovipositor.

The compound eye of a fruit fly. 

Further experimentation showed that the fruit flies can distinguish different species of wasps, and will only choose the alcohol food in response to wasp species that infect larvae, not fly pupae. “Fly larvae usually leave the food before they pupate,” Schlenke explains, “so there is likely little benefit to laying eggs at alcoholic sites when pupal parasites are present.”

The researchers also connected the exposure to female parasitic wasps to changes in a fruit fly neuropeptide.

Stress, and the resulting reduced level of neuropeptide F, or NPF, has previously been associated with alcohol-seeking behavior in fruit flies. Similarly, levels of a homologous neuropeptide in humans, NPY, is associated with alcoholism.

“We found that when a fruit fly is exposed to female parasitic wasps, this exposure reduces the level of NPF in the fly brain, causing the fly to seek out alcoholic sites for oviposition,” Schlenke says. “Furthermore, the alcohol-seeking behavior appears to remain for the duration of the fly’s life, even when the parasitic wasps are no longer present, an example of long-term memory.”

Finally, Drosophila melanogaster is not unique in using this offspring medication behavior. “We tested a number of fly species,” Schlenke says, “and found that each fly species that uses rotting fruit for food mounts this immune behavior against parasitic wasps. Medication may be far more common in nature than we previously thought.”

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Photo of fruit fly eye by Bbski, Wikipedia Commons.

Positive mental health boosts lifespan, study finds

People who are flourishing – both feeling happy and functioning well in their lives – are 60 percent less likely to die prematurely, finds a major study that followed more than 3,000 U.S. adults over 10 years.

The results, published in the American Journal of Public Health, applied to both men and women of varying ages, races, weights and socio-economic status.

“We’ve shown that, even when you factor in many other variables, if you are flourishing you have a dramatically lower risk of premature mortality, no matter what the cause of death,” says lead author Corey Keyes, a sociologist at Emory University and a pioneer of positive psychology.

The data for the analysis drew from the Midlife in the United States Study, which measured baseline positive mental health of the participants in 1995, and followed up in 2005. The ages of the participants spanned 25 to 74 at the beginning of the study, and 35 to 84 at the conclusion.

In the baseline survey, the participants were asked if they had suffered within the past year from depression, panic disorder or generalized anxiety, conditions that have been associated with a higher risk of premature mortality. They were also assessed for emotional happiness, or simply feeling good, and for whether they were functioning well in life, or flourishing. The term flourishing encompasses factors such as managing stress, achieving intimacy with others, working productively and making a contribution to society.

Nearly 50 percent of the study participants, who were representative of the general population, met the criteria for sufficiently high emotional well-being. Only 18 percent, however, were flourishing, meaning they met the full criteria of sufficiently high emotional well-being, combined with sufficiently high social well-being.

“You need both of these qualities for complete happiness,” Keyes says.

A total of 6.3 percent of the participants died during the study period. The odds ratio for mortality was 1.62 for adults who were not flourishing, relative to participants with flourishing mental health.

“What was most amazing to me was that the results held for all ages,” Keyes says. “Even late in life, if you are flourishing you are significantly less likely to die prematurely.”

Tobacco use and physical inactivity, behaviors associated in previous studies with people who have lower levels of emotional well-being, may partially explain how positive mental health affects mortality, Keyes says.

“We focus so much of our national health resources on treating mental illness, when it’s actually the absence of well-being that is getting to us,” Keyes says. “It may be common sense, but it’s uncommon public policy to invest more in promoting well-being.”

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Image: iStockphoto.com.

Compassion meditation may boost neural basis of empathy

The idea behind the compassion-based meditation is that "the feelings we have about people can be trained in optimal ways," says Lobsang Tenzin Negi, who developed the protocol.

By Carol Clark

A compassion-based meditation program can significantly improve a person’s ability to read the facial expressions of others, finds a study published by Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience. This boost in empathic accuracy was detected through both behavioral testing of the study participants and through functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans of their brain activity.

“It’s an intriguing result, suggesting that a behavioral intervention could enhance a key aspect of empathy,” says lead author Jennifer Mascaro, a post-doctoral fellow in anthropology at Emory University. “Previous research has shown that both children and adults who are better at reading the emotional expressions of others have better relationships.”

The meditation protocol, known as Cognitively-Based Compassion Training, or CBCT, was developed at Emory by study co-author Lobsang Tenzin Negi, director of the Emory-Tibet Partnership. Although derived from ancient Tibetan Buddhist practices, the CBCT program is secular in content and presentation.

The research team also included senior author Charles Raison, formerly a psychiatrist at Emory’s School of Medicine and currently at the University of Arizona, and Emory anthropologist James Rilling.

Research shows that people better at reading the emotions of others have better relationships.

When most people think of meditation, they think of a style known as “mindfulness,” in which practitioners seek to improve their ability to concentrate and to be non-judgmentally aware of their thoughts and feelings. While CBCT includes these mindfulness elements, the practice focuses more specifically on training people to analyze and reinterpret their relationships with others.

“The idea is that the feelings we have about people can be trained in optimal ways,” Negi explains. “CBCT aims to condition one’s mind to recognize how we are all inter-dependent, and that everybody desires to be happy and free from suffering at a deep level.”

Study participants were healthy adults without prior meditation experience. Thirteen participants randomized to CBCT meditation completed regular weekly training sessions and at-home practice for eight weeks. Eight randomized control subjects did not meditate, but instead completed health discussion classes that covered mind-body subjects like the effects of exercise and stress on well-being.

To test empathic accuracy before and following CBCT, all participants received fMRI brain scans while completing a modified version of the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (RMET). The RMET consists of black-and-white photographs that show just the eye region of people making various expressions. Those being tested must judge what the person in the photograph is thinking or feeling. 

Eight out of the 13 participants in the CBCT meditation group improved their RMET scores by an average of 4.6 percent, while the control participants showed no increase, and in the majority of cases, a decrease in correct answers for the RMET.

The meditators, in comparison to those in the control group, also had significant increases in neural activity in areas of the brain important for empathy, including the inferior frontal gyrus and dorsomedial prefrontal cortex. These changes in brain activity accounted for changes in the empathic accuracy scores of the participants.

“These findings raise the intriguing possibility that CBCT may have enhanced empathic abilities by increasing activity in parts of the brain that are of central importance for our ability to recognize the emotional states of others,” Raison says. “An important next step will be to evaluate the effects of CBCT on diverse populations that may particularly benefit from enhanced empathic accuracy, such as those suffering from high-functioning autism or severe depression.”

Findings from the current study add to a growing database indicating that the CBCT style of meditation may have physical and emotional effects relevant to health and well-being. For example, previous research at Emory found that practicing CBCT reduced emotional distress and enhanced physical resilience in response to stress in both healthy young adults and in high-risk adolescents in foster care.

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Measuring the healing power of touch

Many people agree that getting a massage makes them feel good. Researchers at Emory University are now quantifying the biological benefits of frequent massage, with the aim of developing potential therapies.

"We really don't know the precise biology of massage right now, but what I can tell you is this: Even in normal individuals, we're able to decrease the production of stress hormones," says Mark Hyman Rapaport, chair of Emory's Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences. "What we're able to demonstrate now is that repeated massage has an added effect." Watch the video, above to learn more.

The research is funded by the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, part of the National Institutes of Health.

"The only way we're going to discern what goes on with complementary or alternative treatments," Rapaport says, "is if an impartial funding agency like the federal government is involved in investigating whether there are true biological, beneficial effects associated with these atypical interventions. There may be many different ways to help individuals."

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Acai berries can lengthen lives of fruit flies

Harvesting acai berries in the Brazilian Amazon. Products made from the berries are sold around the world, and are often marketed as health supplements.

By Quinn Eastman, Woodruff Health Sciences Center

Bewildered by the array of antioxidant fruit juices on display in the supermarket and the promises they make? To sort out the antioxidant properties of fruits and berries, scientists at Emory University School of Medicine turned to fruit flies for help.

They found that a commercially available acai berry product can lengthen the lives of fruit flies, when the flies’ lives are made short through additional oxidative stress. Under certain conditions (a simple sugar diet) acai supplementation could triple flies’ lifespans, from eight to 24 days. Acai could also counteract the neurotoxic effects of the herbicide paraquat on the flies.

The results were recently published by the journal Experimental Gerontology, which awarded the paper its inaugural "Outstanding paper" prize. The lead author is Alysia Vrailas-Mortimer, a postdoctoral fellow in Emory University School of Medicine’s Department of Cell Biology. Vrailas-Mortimer says she didn’t start out focusing on acai. But acai worked better than several other antioxidant products such as vitamins, coenzyme Q10 and lutein.

"One thing that makes our work distinctive is that we tried commercially available supplements," she says. "We went to a health food store and filled up a basket."

She says she began the project with the help of undergraduate student Rosy Gomez, and narrowed her focus after initial success with acai. Vrailas-Mortimer took advantage of a discovery she had made working with Subhabrata Sanyal, assistant professor of cell biology. They had previously found that flies with mutations in the "p38 MAP kinase" gene have shorter lives and are more sensitive to heat, food deprivation and oxidative stress.

P38 mutant flies lived an average of only eight days when they were given a simple sugar water diet. However, their lifespans tripled when their diet was supplemented with acai. Ginger was used as a control for the diet supplements.

Acai also protected normal flies against oxidative stress, in the form of hydrogen peroxide or paraquat. Acai can protect against oxidative stress when flies are exposed to hydrogen peroxide before being given acai, but the protective effect does not hold up if the order is reversed.

Paraquat is an herbicide that has neurotoxic effects that resemble Parkinson’s disease. Under the influence of paraquat, flies’ sleep-wake cycles gradually become chaotic (see graph, above). Acai can also help soften the effects of paraquat on flies’ circadian rhythms.

"I think this is important," Vrailas-Mortimer says. "We show that whatever is in acai that is lengthening lifespan, it can also keep the flies functioning better for longer when faced with paraquat exposure. It is maintaining quality of life rather than just preventing them from dying."

Read more at Emory News Center.

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Photo: iStockphoto.com.

Frequent massage boosts biological benefits

By Kathi Baker, Woodruff Health Sciences Center

Repeated massage therapy delivers sustained, cumulative beneficial effects, a new study shows. The effects persist for several days to a week, and differ depending on the frequency of sessions. Results of the study were reported in the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine.

The researchers, led by Mark Hyman Rapaport, examined the biological effects of repeated Swedish Massage Therapy and light touch intervention. In a prior study, the researchers found that healthy people who undergo a single session of Swedish Massage experience measureable changes in their body’s immune and endocrine response.

"We expanded the study to show the effects of repeated massage because we believed the frequency of massage, or the interval between massages, may have different biological and psychological effects than a single session," explains Rapaport, chair of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Emory University School of Medicine.

The study was conducted over five weeks, assessing neuroendocrine and immune parameters. Study volunteers were randomized into four intervention groups to receive a concurrent five weeks of Swedish Massage once a week or twice a week, or a light touch control once a week or twice a week.

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Her patient approach to health: Tapping traditional remedies to fight modern super bugs

Cassandra Quave bridges traditional and modern medicine as an ethnobotanist, studying human interactions with plants.

By Carol Clark

Cassandra Quave was first immersed in the battle against infectious diseases when she was 3 years old and hospitalized with a life-threatening case of staph.

“That’s probably why I feel a strong connection to people who deal with these kinds of infections,” says Quave, a graduate of Emory College who is now a visiting assistant professor at Emory’s Center for the Study of Human Health.

Quave just received a $1.8 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to pursue her research into how an extract from a tree common in forests across Europe might help fight antibiotic-resistant staph. The five-year project led by Quave will include collaborators from the Emory Institute for Drug Development, the University of Iowa and Montana State University.

She notes that prolific use of modern drugs in our society helped turn multi-drug resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) into the leading cause of invasive disease in the U.S., killing more people every year than AIDS. And the remedies of traditional healers may lead to better ways of treating it.

Quave draws from the knowledge of rural people like 82-year-old Donato Sabato of Italy, who uses Malva sylvestris stems to treat stomachache. Photo by Cassandra Quave.

“Ideally, we should combine the best of both modern medicine and complementary alternative medicine,” says Quave. She bridges the two worlds as a medical ethnobotanist, studying human interactions with plants.

At 34, Quave already has a utility patent for one promising medicinal plant extract, and has filed a disclosure for a second patent. In 2011, she formed the bio-venture startup PhytoTEK with a friend from Harvard Business School, Sahil Patel, who is also an Emory alumnus. PhytoTEK advanced to the final round of the Harvard Business School’s Alumni New Venture Contest, placing in the top three of the global finals.

The unusual career of Quave (rhymes with “wave”) has been forged by everything from interviewing native healers in the Peruvian Amazon to undergoing dozens of major medical procedures in the United States.

She grew up in the small town of Arcadia, in a rural area of South Florida, where her mother was a teacher and her father ran a land-clearing business for agriculture. She had multiple congenital birth defects of her skeletal system, including missing part of her right calf bone. When she was 3, her right leg was amputated below the knee in an effort to improve her mobility.

“The doctors told my mother not to unwrap the bandages, but she noticed this horrible stench coming from my leg and knew that something wasn’t right,” Quave says. “As she took off the bandages, the flesh just fell off the bone. It was almost liquefied.”

Quave in the hospital, after the amputation of her lower right leg.

The toddler returned to the hospital for treatment of a severe staph infection. “I had to spend a very long time in the hospital,” she recalls. “I remember the nurses putting me in a bright-red bath of Betadine. I thought it was blood.”

Her leg had to be cut off even shorter, leaving her with a heavily scarred stump that lacks fatty tissue, making prosthetics less comfortable.

A neighbor later told Quave that she had felt sorry for her when she was a little girl and watched her struggle to climb the ladder of a slide. The neighbor thought it was terrible that Quave’s mother saw her daughter cry from the effort, and didn’t go and help.

“I’m so glad my parents had the strength not to help me do everything,” Quave says. “That made me independent. It takes a special person to raise a disabled child.”

Quave at work in the Amazon.

Like many kids, Quave enjoyed playing in the dirt or climbing a tree to be alone with a good book. During high school, she learned to operate the bulldozer and backhoe parked in the family’s yard, so she could help with her father’s business on summer breaks. Curiosity was her constant companion. She excelled in science fairs, competing at the state and international level. For her first science project, in the sixth grade, she took saliva samples from her dog, a horse and a cow for a comparative analysis. 

Nearly every year as she grew up, Quave had to return to the hospital to have her leg re-operated on. The bone had to be filed down as it kept growing out the end of the stump. She later made history as one of the first amputees to have bone lengthening surgery. “They broke my femur and implanted a kind of knob that you twist,” Quave explains matter-of-factly.

At 13, she developed scoliosis. Metal rods were surgically implanted in her back. She also had hip dysplasia, requiring her pelvis to be broken and rebuilt.

One silver lining to her slew of medical problems was pediatric orthopedist Chad Price, who also happens to be an Emory alumnus. He performed almost every surgery on Quave, except for the initial leg amputation, and became a friend and mentor that Quave still consults.

“I was a very odd, inquisitive kid, and Dr. Price took the time to listen to me and answer all of my questions,” Quave says. “He is different from most surgeons, he’s almost like a traditional healer in the way that he connects with patients,” she adds. “I remember once when I was coming out of anesthesia, and I was crying because it hurt so much. Dr. Price lay down in the bed next to me and held me.”

The metal rods implanted in Quave’s spine had to be removed after she had a bad reaction to them and her back became inflamed. Quave told one of the medical residents who saw her before surgery that she wanted the operation filmed.

“He thought that was a really strange request and said, no, but then Dr. Price said, ‘Sure, we’ll do that for you.’ I still have the VHS tape at home. It was fascinating to me, to see them chisel these rods out of my back.”

"I have as much respect for the best traditional healers as I do for the top scientists at Emory," says Cassandra Quave, right, in the Peruvian Amazon as an undergraduate at Emory.

During the 8th grade, Quave started volunteering at the local hospital’s emergency room. “I would spend Friday and Saturday nights watching doctors perform procedures in this small-town E.R. I’d make sure the patients were comfortable, bring them blankets and things,” she recalls. “I definitely had a gift for communicating with people who were sick.”

When her mother insisted that she get home before 2 am, Quave recalls arguing, “That’s when all the good drug cases and bar fights start coming in.”

Following in the footsteps of Price, Quave got her undergraduate degree at Emory, where she majored in biology and anthropology. She planned to go on to medical school and become an orthopedic surgeon. But a different path opened up when she took a tropical ecology class from Larry Wilson, an adjunct faculty in Emory’s department of environmental studies and an ecologist at Atlanta’s Fernbank Science Center. Under Wilson’s tutelage, Quave spent several months in the Peruvian Amazon, researching the therapies of traditional healers.

“You can learn a lot by listening to those people,” Quave says. “I have as much respect for the best traditional healers as I do for the top scientists at Emory.”

Traveling by boat through the Amazon. Photo by Cassandra Quave.

Quave’s leg became inflamed and infected from the rough walking on the jungle trails, but she had come prepared with antibiotics. She treated her leg and simply walked less, switching to small riverboats to travel amid the mestizo communities.

Many of the children had swollen bellies and stunted growth, telltale signs of intestinal worms. A traditional healer explained to her how the white latex from a fig tree could be made into a remedy to purge worms. The Peruvian government, however, had installed medicine chests in the remote communities, stocked with treatments for parasites and other ailments. Eventually, the supplies were used and not replenished. Meanwhile, the traditional healers had stopped training apprentices because people preferred the stronger drugs to the older ways.

“I would see all these kids with swollen bellies, and a fig tree right in the middle of the village, but no one knew how to prepare the treatment,” Quave says. “It’s a great example of why we have to understand both sets of knowledge – modern and traditional.”

A Peruvian healer shares his knowledge. Photo by Cassandra Quave.

She uses the term “complementary alternative medicine,” or CAM, adding: “There is a reason it’s called ‘complementary.’ It doesn’t have to be just one or the other.”

An acceptance letter from a medical school was waiting for her when she returned to Atlanta during her senior year at Emory, but the Amazon had changed Quave. She no longer wanted to be an MD. A chance meeting with an Italian ethnobiologist at a conference led Quave to Southern Italy, where she conducted field research into the traditional remedies of rural people there.

She wrote a sort of “cookbook” of traditional medicine of the region. The volume, penned in English and Italian, and full of gorgeous photographs, aims to conserve both the local knowledge and the natural environment.

A weed to one person is medicine to another.

Quave also fell in love while in Italy. She married Marco Caputo, a resident of the tiny town of Ginestra, and they now have two young children. “It’s funny how fate works,” she says.

Back in the United States, Quave pursued a PhD in biology at Florida International University, where she focused on an ethnobotanical approach to drug discovery. “I felt strongly that people who dismissed traditional healing plants as medicine because the plants don’t kill a pathogen were not asking the right questions,” she says. “What if these plants play some other role in fighting a disease?”

She led a project to analyze extracts from 100 different species of plants that she had collected in Italy, guided by clues from hundreds of interviews with local people and healers. She was particularly interested in finding treatments for skin and soft-tissue infections, to help in the fight against MRSA.

This “super bug” bacterium can cause everything from mild skin irritation to death. MRSA is difficult to treat because it is constantly adapting, and has become resistant to many antibiotics. It is now common in people with weak immune systems in hospitals and nursing homes. People with implanted medical devices, like knee or hip replacements, are especially at risk since the implants provide a smooth surface that the sugary matrix of the bacteria likes to adhere to.

In 2005, the CDC reported that MRSA was responsible for an estimated 94,000 life-threatening infections and 18,650 deaths, and the rates have kept rising since then.

Rubus ulmifolius, or the elm leaf blackberry, is one plant that shows promise for treating MRSA.

Even more alarmingly, MRSA infections are on the rise in healthy, young people outside of hospitals. Those who share close quarters and have skin-to-skin contact, such as football players, are at higher risk.

Quave is uncovering promising new ways to treat MRSA by teasing apart leaves, stems, roots and bark, isolating individual plant compounds for analysis. Her first patent involves a compound from the roots of an Italian elm leaf blackberry that neutralizes the staph defense system.

“Think of it like Star Trek,” she says, explaining that after MRSA attaches to something, it can grow a biofilm that acts like a shield against antibiotics, much like a villainous space ship uses a force field to ward off weapons of the Starship Enterprise. The plant extract prevents the MRSA bacteria from attaching to anything, so it can’t throw up a force field.

Quave hopes that the extract could one day be used to coat artificial implants and catheters before they are surgically implanted, preventing MRSA from ever gaining a foothold on them.

The recent NIH grant Quave received will further her research into a second compound from a European tree. This compound, which she is identifying only as “Extract 134” until a utility patent is filed, inhibits the toxic effects of MRSA.

An Albanian woman tells her plant stories.

“One reason that MRSA can infect healthy people is that it’s really good at producing a ton of toxins that it shoots out like lasers to cause tissue damage,” Quave says. “Extract 134 turns off the MRSA system responsible for toxin production. The bacteria is still able to grow, but its weapons are turned off.”

Taking away MRSA’s tissue damaging weapons, and/or its force field, could tip the battle back into the favor of the host’s immune system, with little, or no, help from antibiotics, Quave theorizes.

“It’s more of a delicate approach. The goal is to improve patient therapy, reduce infection rates, and avoid creating more virulent strains of MRSA,” she says.

After a post-doctoral stint at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, Quave joined Emory last fall. She was recruited by another one of her long-time mentors, Michelle Lampl, a physician and anthropologist who heads Emory’s Center for the Study of Human Health. Lampl founded the center last year to serve as a nexus of Emory’s diverse assets in health education, research and practices. The aim is to foster exchange among scholars whose interests span the scientific, social and cultural dimensions of health and well-being.

Quave teaches a course on medical botany while also pursuing her drug discovery research that will tap expertise from anthropology, biology, chemistry and environmental studies. “I have my finger in a lot of pies,” Quave says, “so I tend to bring together a lot of different people who might not normally mix.”

Many hurdles remain to getting the plant-based MRSA treatments from the laboratory into clinical trials, but Quave is undaunted. “I’m used to obstacles,” she says. “I’ve climbed a lot of brick walls in my life.”

All photos courtesy of Cassandra Quave.

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The dark lore of Deadly Nightshade

The dark lore of Deadly Nightshade

Atropa belladonna, or Deadly Nightshade, is native to Europe. Drawing from 1887 edition of "Kohler's Medicinal Plants."

“Hot as a hare, blind as a bat, dry as a bone, red as a beet and mad as a hen.”

This centuries-old text describes symptoms that can be caused by Atropa belladonna, more commonly known as Belladonna, or Deadly Nightshade. The beautiful, but highly toxic, plant “is very interesting in that it has this dark lore associated with witches,” says Kristen Cross, an Emory junior majoring in biology and environmental studies.

Cross recently gave a presentation on Deadly Nightshade, as part of Emory’s Botanical Medicine and Health class taught by enthnobotanist Cassandra Quave. Click here to watch a video of her talk.

Kurt Stuber/Wikipedia Commons

Atropine and hyoscine are the chemicals that make the plant toxic, as well as giving it potent medicinal and intoxicating effects. Consumption of only a few berries from the Deadly Nightshade can be lethal.

Women mixed Deadly Nightshade and other plants together to make “flying ointments,” Cross says. “They would get together at night and have these rituals where they would experience sensations of flying and euphoria.”

Women in Venice used drops made from Deadly Nightshade to make their pupils dilate and increase the allure of their eyes. It was also used in ocular surgery during the 1800s to make it easier to remove cataracts.

Today, extracts from Deadly Nightshade are showing promise for treatment of depression and nausea, among other benefits. The plant “is on the dangerous border of very poisonous and very useful,” Cross notes.

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Compassion training benefits foster children

By Kathi Baker, Woodruff Health Sciences Center

Cognitively-Based Compassion Training (CBCT) appears to improve the mental and physical health of adolescents in foster care, a new study shows. CBCT is a therapeutic intervention that uses meditation and other strategies geared to help people develop more compassionate attitudes toward themselves and others.

It is well documented that children in foster care have a high prevalence of trauma in their lives. For many, circumstances that bring them into the foster care system are formidable — sexual abuse, parental neglect, family violence, homelessness and exposure to drugs. In addition, they are separated from biological family and some are regularly moved around from one place to another.

Emory researchers conducted the study in collaboration with the Georgia Department of Human Services and the Division of Family and Child Services. The study was recently published online in the journals Psychoneuroendocrinology and Child and Family Studies.

"Children with early life adversity tend to have elevated levels of inflammation across their lifespan," explains Thaddeus Pace, lead author on the paper in Psychoneuroendocrinology, and assistant professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Emory.

"Inflammation is known to play a fundamental role in the development of a number of chronic illnesses, including cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, dementia, cancer and depression."

The study finds that adolescents who practiced CBCT showed reductions in the inflammatory marker C-reactive protein (CRP), reduced anxiety and increased feelings of hopefulness. The more the study participants practiced, the greater the improvement observed in these measures.

"The beneficial effects of CBCT on anxiety and feelings of hopelessness suggest that this intervention may provide immediate benefit to foster children," says Charles Raison, a co-author of the study, now at the University of Arizona. "We are even more encouraged by the finding that CBCT reduced levels of inflammation. Our hope is that CBCT may help contribute to the long-term health and well being of foster care children, not only during childhood, but also as they move into their adult years."

Additionally, an article recently published in the journal Pediatrics reported that a high proportion of children in foster care programs across the United States are on psychiatric medications, perhaps inappropriately.

"In light of the increasing concern that we may be over-medicating children in state custody, our findings that CBCT can help with behavioral and physical health issues may be especially timely," says Linda Craighead, senior author for the paper published in Child and Family Studies, and professor of psychology at Emory.

CBCT is a multi-week program developed at Emory by Geshe Lobsang Tenzin Negi, one of the study's co-authors. Although derived from Tibetan Buddhist teachings on compassion, the CBCT program has been designed to be completely secular in nature.

The Georgia Department of Human Services and the Division of Family and Child Services identified 71 adolescents between the ages of 13 and 19 as eligible for study participation. All of the children lived in the greater metropolitan Atlanta area, and were in foster care at the time of the study.

The participants were randomized to six weeks of Cognitvely-Based Compassion Training, or to a wait list control group. Before and after these interventions the adolescents were assessed on various measures of anxiety and hope about the future. They also provided saliva samples for the measurement of C-reactive protein.

The researchers found that within the CBCT group, participation in practice sessions during the study correlated with reduced CRP from baseline to the six-week assessment. The researchers emphasize that further studies will be needed to determine if there are long-term benefits with CBCT.

Images: iStockphoto.com.

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Playing for time: Music lessons boost brain, slow aging

By Kerry Ludlam, Woodruff Health Sciences Center

It turns out mom was right. Music lessons are good for you, and those benefits may last a lifetime.

A recent study conducted by Brenda Hanna-Pladdy, a clinical neuropsychologist in Emory's School of Medicine, offers additional evidence that musical instrumental training, when compared to other activities, may reduce the effects of memory decline and cognitive aging.

This is the second study published by Hanna-Pladdy, which confirms and refines findings from an original study published in Neuropsychology in 2011 that revealed that musicians with at least 10 years of instrumental musical training remained cognitively sharp in advanced age. The new findings were published in the July issue of Frontiers in Human Neuroscience.

“The study confirms that musical activity preserves cognition as we age, by comparing variability in cognitive outcomes of older adults active in musical instrumental and other leisure activities,” says Hanna-Pladdy. “A range of cognitive benefits, including memory, was sustained for musicians between the ages of 60-80 if they played for at least 10 years throughout their life, confirming that maintenance of advantages is not reliant on continued activity. In other words, you don’t use it or lose it. Nonetheless, the study highlighted the critical importance of the timing of musical activity, which may optimize cognitive benefits.”

The cognitive enhancements in older musicians included a range of verbal and nonverbal functions, as well as memory, which is the hallmark of Alzhemier’s pathology. The study evaluated the timing of musical engagement to determine whether there is a critical period of musical training for optimal cognitive advantages in advanced age. While years of playing music were the best indication of enhanced cognition in advanced age, the results revealed different sensitive periods for cognitive development across the lifespan. Early age of acquisition, before age nine, predicted verbal working memory functions such as remembering and reorganizing digits in your head, consistent with early sensitive periods in brain development. Sustained musical activity in advanced age predicted other non-verbal abilities involving visuospatial judgment, suggesting it is never too late to be musically active.

Continued musical activity in advanced age also appeared to buffer lower educational levels.

“This is an exciting finding in light of recent evidence suggesting that high educational levels are likely to yield cognitive reserve that may potentially delay the onset of Alzheimer’s symptoms or cognitive decline,” says Hanna-Pladdy. “This also highlights the promising role of musical activity as a form of cognitive enrichment across the lifespan, and it raises the question of whether musical training should eventually be considered an alternative form of educational training.”

According to Hanna-Pladdy, to obtain optimal results, individuals should start musical training before age nine, play at least 10 years or more and if possible, keep playing for as long as possible over the age of 60.

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Images: iStockphoto.com.

Study of psychosis risk and brain to track effects of Omega-3 pills

The study will use a specific combination of omega-3 fatty acids in its supplements, unlike over-the-counter fish oil pills, which are unregulated.

By Carol Clark

The first major study on the biological effects of omega-3 fatty acids on the human brain is focusing on the role that this natural substance, primarily found in fish oil, may play in fighting psychosis.

Emory University recently launched the first phase of the double-blind, clinical trial of a specific combination of omega-3 fatty acid supplements, which will ultimately involve about 160 participants, and researchers from eight universities.

“This will be the first study to conduct an extensive assessment of changes in the brain associated with omega-3 fatty acids,” says lead investigator Elaine Walker, professor of psychology and neuroscience at Emory. “We are most interested in the question of how to potentially prevent the onset of psychosis.”

Non-invasive techniques will be used to record both the density of different regions of the brain, and the robustness of neural connectivity, to compare the effects of a placebo and omega-3 fatty acids on teens and young adults who may be at risk for psychosis.

Omega-3 fatty acids cannot be made by the human body, but are necessary for normal metabolism. Common sources include fish oils, algae and flaxseed oil.

The omega-3 study, expected to last at least a year, is part of a larger, comprehensive, project to investigate the origins and prevention of psychosis, headed by Walker at Emory and funded by a grant from the National Institutes of Mental Health (NIMH).

Watch a 2010 video, below, of Elaine Walker explaining the facts, and myths, of schizophrenia:


Schizophrenia, the most extreme psychosis, affects about 1 percent of the population. The typical onset of schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders is about 21 years of age, with warning signs beginning, on average, around age 17. Studies have shown that about 30 to 40 percent of teenagers showing warning signs will develop schizophrenia or another psychotic disorder. Another 25 percent of these at-risk teens continue to experience mild symptoms without getting worse, while the remaining 35 percent get better as they enter adulthood.

While anti-psychotic drugs can be effective, they also have side effects, so physicians are hesitant to recommend them until someone enters the clinical stages of the illness.

The causes of psychosis are unclear, but one of the dominant theories is that changes in the brain adversely affect the connections among neurons as psychosis is emerging.

Animal studies have demonstrated that omega-3 has a protective effect on these connections. And some people with schizophrenia tend to have low levels of omega-3 fatty acids. These factors led the University of Vienna, Austria, to conduct a behavioral study for the effects of an omega-3 formulation on teenagers at risk for psychosis. The results, published in 2010, found that 11 out of 40 high-risk teens who had taken a placebo for 12 weeks developed clinical psychosis within a year, but only two out of 41 high-risk teens who took omega 3 succumbed to the disorder.

“The magnitude of the effect they reported, 22.6 percent, was surprising,” Walker says. “And given the devastating impact of this illness, anything that shows that kind of promise is worth pursuing.”

The supplements used in the NIMH study will contain 1,100 milligrams of omega-3 fatty acid, about the same amount in four ounces of wild salmon.

The NIMH study will combine behavioral and cognitive measurements of participants, along with the biological measurements. Half of the participants will take a placebo, while the other half will take omega-3 pills containing 1,100 milligrams of omega-3 fatty acid, about the same amount in four ounces of wild salmon.

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) will be used to record before-and-after images of the brain. The resulting data will allow the researchers to compare any changes in density in different brain regions.

In addition, diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) will record the activity of the connections between the various brain regions, to compare any changes in the robustness of this circuitry.

Participants in the study will also receive psychological counseling. “Young people showing these risk signs are typically in distress,” Walker says. “This study is an opportunity to get some support and, potentially, preventive intervention.”

Walker, who has studied psychosis for more than 30 years, cautions that, no matter what the results of the study, no panacea is in the offing. “Psychosis is a class of disorders,” she explains. “As is the case with cancer, not all medicines and treatments work for all persons and types of cancer. Treatments have to be tailored.”

The NIMH has made learning the neural mechanisms involved in psychosis a priority, due to the terrible economic and social toll of the illness. “Most psychotic disorders end up becoming chronic illnesses,” Walker says. “If we could prevent 20 percent of the cases, that would be great. If we could prevent 50 percent, that would be an amazing achievement.”

Images: iStockPhoto.com

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Fruit flies use alcohol as a drug to kill parasites

By Carol Clark

Fruit flies infected with a blood-borne parasite consume alcohol to self-medicate, a behavior that greatly increases their survival rate, an Emory University study finds.

“We believe our results are the first to show that alcohol consumption can have a protective effect against infectious disease, and in particular against blood-borne parasites,” says Todd Schlenke, the evolutionary geneticist who led the research.

“It may be that fruit flies are uniquely adapted to using alcohol as medicine,” he adds, “but our data raise an important question: Could other organisms, perhaps even humans, control blood-borne parasites through high doses of alcohol?”

Current Biology is publishing the study, co-authored by Emory graduate student Neil Milan and undergraduate student Balint Kacsoh.

The results add to the growing body of evidence that some animals know how to use toxic substances found in nature as medicine.

A vicious, co-evolutionary battle is constantly ongoing between the common fruit fly, above, and tiny, parasitoid wasps that lay their eggs in the larvae of fruit flies. Photo by Andre Karwath/Wikipedia Commons.

Drosophila melanogaster, the common fruit fly that swirls around browning bananas in your kitchen, is an important biological model system. The Schlenke lab uses D. melanogaster to study how immune systems adapt to pathogens.

The fly larvae eat the rot, or fungi and bacteria, that grows on overripe, fermenting fruit. “They’re essentially living in booze,” Schlenke says. “The amount of alcohol in their natural habitat can range from 5 to 15 percent. Imagine if everything that you ate and drank all day long was 5-percent alcohol. We wouldn’t be able to live like that, but fruit flies are really good at detoxifying alcohol.”

Tiny, endoparasitoid wasps are major killers of fruit flies. The wasps inject their eggs inside the fruit fly larvae, along with venom that aims to suppress their hosts’ immune response. If the venom is effective enough, the wasp egg hatches, and the wasp larva begins to eat the fruit fly larva from the inside out. Eventually, an adult wasp emerges from the remains of the fruit fly pupa.

Adult wasps are about to emerge from fruit fly pupae, above, after eating the fruit fly larvae from the inside out. Photo by Todd Schlenke.

Some fruit flies, however, can overcome the effects of wasp venom and mount an immune response against wasp eggs. The blood cells in these fly larvae swarm over the wasp eggs and release nasty chemicals to kill them, allowing the fruit fly larvae to grow into adults.

“A constant co-evolutionary battle is going on between the immune systems of the flies and the venoms of the wasps,” Schlenke says. “Any new mechanism of defense that protects flies from wasps will tend to spread through fly populations by natural selection.”

Schlenke wondered if the fruit flies could be tapping the toxic effects of alcohol in their natural habitat to fight off wasps.

To test the theory, the researchers used a bisected petri dish filled with the yeast that fruit flies are normally fed in a lab environment. The yeast on one side of the dish was mixed with 6 percent alcohol, while the yeast on the other side remained alcohol-free. The researchers then released fruit fly larvae into the dish, allowing them to freely move to either side.

After 24 hours, 80 percent of the fruit fly larvae that were infected with wasps were on the alcohol side of the dish, while only 30 percent of the non-infected fruit fly larvae were on the alcohol side.


If fruit flies infected with wasps tap the alcohol in rotting fruit, it raises their blood-alcohol levels and their survival rates. The alcohol doesn't just kill the wasps, it essentially liquifies them. Photo by Carol Clark.

“The strength of the result was surprising,” Schlenke says. “The infected fruit flies really do seem to purposely consume alcohol, and the alcohol consumption correlates to much higher survival rates.”

Infected fruit flies that consumed alcohol beat out the wasps in about 60 percent of the cases, compared to a 0 percent survival rate for fruit fly controls that fed on plain yeast.

“The wasps aren’t as good as the flies at handling alcohol,” Schlenke says.

A developing wasp knocked out within an alcohol-consuming fly larva dies in a particularly horrible way, he adds. “The wasp’s internal organs disperse and appear to be ejected out of its anus. It’s an unusual phenotype that we haven’t seen in our wasps before,” Schlenke says.

The lab repeated the experiment using another species of wasp that specializes in laying its eggs in D. melanogaster, rather than the generalist wasp used previously. Again, 80 percent of the infected flies wound up on the alcohol side of the dish, while only 30 percent of the uninfected flies did. But the alcohol diet was far less effective against the specialist wasps, killing them in only 10 percent of the cases.

“You would expect this kind of result,” Schlenke says, “since the generalist wasp species can attack plenty of other flies, but the specialist wasps are under strong pressure to adapt to the alcohol-infused habitat of D. melanogaster.”

The researchers hope that their data will lead to more studies of how alcohol may control pathogens in other organisms, including humans.

“Although many studies in humans have shown decreased immune function in chronic consumers of alcohol, little attempt has been made to assay any beneficial effect of acute or moderate alcohol use on parasite mortality or overall host fitness following infection,” Schlenke says.

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