Scientific study suggests an association between physical doping and brain doping

Physical doping and brain doping apparently often go hand in hand. A study from Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) and Eberhard Karls University in Tubingen revealed that people who engage in physical doping often also take drugs for brain doping. The study was the first of its kind to survey simultaneously the two categories of doping and brain doping. Around 3,000 hobby triathletes were anonymously surveyed using a questionnaire at sporting events in Frankfurt, Regensburg, and Wiesbaden. “The results correlated with earlier findings about doping in leisure and popular sports and brain doping in society as a whole. The findings also illustrated for the first time that physical doping and brain doping often go together, at least for recreational triathletes,” said Mainz University Professor of Sports Medicine Dr. Dr. Perikles Simon.

The study was carried out using the randomized response technique (RRT), which allows for better estimates of unknown cases in response to sensitive questions. It suggested that 13.0 percent of the athletes surveyed had used illegal and banned substances in the twelve months prior to the survey; 15.1 percent were believed to have engaged in brain doping.

When talking about doping substances, a distinction is made between illicit drugs such as cocaine or heroin and banned substances for physical performance enhancement such as anabolic steroids, EPO, or growth hormones. Brain doping is the use of illegal substances and pharmaceuticals such as illegal amphetamines, modafinil or Ritalin to improve mental performance.

The findings indicate that the estimated proportion of men who dope (13.7 percent) is higher than the proportion of women (8.0 percent). The prevalence of doping also seemed to be higher at the European Championships in Frankfurt than at the other triathlons in Regensburg and Wiesbaden. The competitions involved participants taking part in either a classic Ironman with a 4 kilometer swim, 180 kilometer cycle ride, and 42 kilometer marathon or tackling half of the actual Ironman distance.

In their survey carried out during the 2011 season, the scientists interviewed a total of 2,997 triathlon participants. 2,987 questionnaires (99.7 percent) were returned. The study also examined whether there was a correlation between the use of legal and freely available substances for improving physical and mental performance and the use of illegal and banned substances. This would appear to be the case, as athletes who use legal substances to improve their performance also tend to use illegal substances as well.

Finally, another important finding of the study was the sign of a correlation between physical doping and brain doping, which can be found with both legal and illicit substances. The use of legal substances to enhance physical performance is thus relatively often associated with the consumption of substances to improve mental performance, just as there is a correlation between the use of illicit substances for both doping and brain doping. “This indicates that athletes do not actually take the substances to achieve a specific goal, but may show a certain propensity towards performance enhancing substances,” explained Simon. The findings are important to better understand why people take such substances and to be able to provide targeted prevention.

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Caffeine has positive effect on memory

Whether it’s a mug full of fresh-brewed coffee, a cup of hot tea, or a can of soda, consuming caffeine is the energy boost of choice for millions who want to wake up or stay up.

Now, researchers at Johns Hopkins University have found another use for the popular stimulant: memory enhancer.

Michael Yassa, an assistant professor of psychological and brain sciences at Johns Hopkins, and his team of scientists found that caffeine has a positive effect on our long-term memory. Their research, published by the journal Nature Neuroscience, shows that caffeine enhances certain memories at least up to 24 hours after it is consumed.

"We’ve always known that caffeine has cognitive-enhancing effects, but its particular effects on strengthening memories and making them resistant to forgetting has never been examined in detail in humans," said Yassa, senior author of the paper. "We report for the first time a specific effect of caffeine on reducing forgetting over 24 hours."

The Johns Hopkins researchers conducted a double-blind trial in which participants who did not regularly eat or drink caffeinated products received either a placebo or a 200-milligram caffeine tablet five minutes after studying a series of images. Salivary samples were taken from the participants before they took the tablets to measure their caffeine levels. Samples were taken again one, three, and 24 hours afterwards.

The next day, both groups were tested on their ability to recognize images from the previous day’s study session. On the test, some of the visuals were the same as those from the day before, some were new additions, and some were similar but not the same.

More members of the caffeine group were able to correctly identify the new images as “similar” to previously viewed images rather than erroneously citing them as the same.

The brain’s ability to recognize the difference between two similar but not identical items, called pattern separation, reflects a deeper level of memory retention, the researchers said.

"If we used a standard recognition memory task without these tricky similar items, we would have found no effect of caffeine," Yassa said. "However, using these items requires the brain to make a more difficult discrimination—what we call pattern separation, which seems to be the process that is enhanced by caffeine in our case."

The memory center in the human brain is the hippocampus, a seahorse-shaped area in the medial temporal lobe of the brain. The hippocampus is the switchbox for all short- and long-term memories. Most research done on memory—the effects of concussions in athletes, of war-related head injuries, and of dementia in the aging population—focuses on this area of the brain.

Until now, caffeine’s effects on long-term memory had not been examined in detail. Of the few studies done, the general consensus was that caffeine has little or no effect on long-term memory retention.

The research is different from prior experiments because the subjects took the caffeine tablets only after they had viewed and attempted to memorize the images.

"Almost all prior studies administered caffeine before the study session, so if there is an enhancement, it’s not clear if it’s due to caffeine’s effects on attention, vigilance, focus, or other factors," Yassa said. "By administering caffeine after the experiment, we rule out all of these effects and make sure that if there is an enhancement, it’s due to memory and nothing else."

According to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, 90 percent of people worldwide consume caffeine in one form or another. In the United States, 80 percent of adults consume caffeine every day. The average adult has an intake of about 200 milligrams—the same amount used in the Yassa study—or roughly one cup of strong coffee per day.

Yassa’s team completed the research at Johns Hopkins before his lab moved to the University of California, Irvine, at the start of this year.

"The next step for us is to figure out the brain mechanisms underlying this enhancement," Yassa said. "We can use brain-imaging techniques to address these questions. We also know that caffeine is associated with healthy longevity and may have some protective effects from cognitive decline like Alzheimer’s disease. These are certainly important questions for the future."

Scientists Solve 40-year Mystery of How Sodium Controls Opioid Brain Signaling

Scientists have discovered how the element sodium influences the signaling of a major class of brain cell receptors, known as opioid receptors. The discovery, from The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) and the University of North Carolina (UNC), suggests new therapeutic approaches to a host of brain-related medical conditions.

“It opens the door to understanding opioid related drugs for treating pain and mood disorders, among others,” said lead author Dr. Gustavo Fenalti, a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Professor Raymond C. Stevens of TSRI’s Department of Integrative Structural and Computational Biology.

“This discovery has helped us decipher a 40-year-old mystery about sodium’s control of opioid receptors,” said Stevens, who was senior author of the paper with UNC pharmacologist Professor Bryan Roth. “It is amazing how sodium sits right in the middle of the receptor as a co-factor or allosteric modulator.”

The findings appear in an advanced online publication in the journal Nature on January 12, 2014.

A Sharper Image

The researchers revealed the basis for sodium’s effect on signaling with a high-resolution 3-D view of an opioid receptor’s atomic structure. Opioid receptors are activated by peptide neurotransmitters (endorphins, dynorphins and enkephalins) in the brain. They can also be activated by plant-derived and synthetic drugs that mimic these peptides: among them morphine, codeine, oxycodone and heroin.

Despite these receptors’ crucial importance in health and disease, including pain disorders and addictions, scientists have only begun to understand in detail how they work. Opioid receptors are inherently flimsy and fragile when produced in isolation, and thus have been hard to study using X-ray crystallography, the usual structure-mapping method for large proteins.

In recent years, the Stevens laboratory has helped pioneer the structure determination of G protein-coupled receptors. Although the first crystallographic structures of opioid receptors were determined in 2012, these structural models weren’t fine-grained enough to solve a lingering mystery, particularly for the human delta opioid receptor.

That mystery concerned the role of sodium. The element is perhaps best known to biologists as one of the key “electrolytes” needed for the basic workings of cells. In the early 1970s, researchers in the laboratory of neuroscientist Solomon Snyder at Johns Hopkins University, who had helped discover opioid receptors, found evidence that sodium ions also act as a kind of switch on opioid receptor signaling. They noted that at concentrations normally found in brain fluid, these ions reduced the ability of opioid peptides and drugs like morphine to interact with opioid receptors.

How sodium could exert this indirect (“allosteric”) effect on opioid receptor activity was unclear—and has remained an unsolved puzzle for decades. Now that scientists have discovered the mechanism of sodium’s effect, then in principle they can exploit it to develop better opioid-receptor-targeting drugs.

A Switch Controlling Pain, Depression and Mood Disorders

For the new study, the team constructed a novel, fusion-protein-stabilized version of one of the main opioid receptors in the human brain, known as the delta opioid receptor, and managed to form crystals of it for X-ray crystallography. The latter revealed the receptor’s 3-D atomic structure to a resolution of 1.8 Angstroms (180 trillionths of a meter)—the sharpest picture yet of an opioid receptor.

“Such a high resolution is really necessary to be able to understand in detail how the receptor works,” said Stevens.

The analysis yielded several key details of opioid receptor structure and function, most importantly the details of the “allosteric sodium site,” where a sodium ion can slip in and modulate receptor activity.

The team was able to identify the crucial amino acids that hold the sodium ion in place and transmit its signal-modulating effect. “We found that the presence of the sodium ion holds the receptor protein in a shape that gives it a different affinity for its corresponding neurotransmitter peptides,” Fenalti said.

With the structural data in hand, the researchers designed new versions of the receptor, in which key sodium-site amino-acids were mutated, to see how this would affect receptor signaling. Co-lead author Research Associate Patrick M. Giguere and colleagues in Roth’s Laboratory at UNC, which has long collaborated with the Stevens laboratory, tested these mutant receptors and found that certain amino-acid changes cause radical shifts in the receptor’s normal signaling response.

The most interesting shifts involved a little-understood secondary or “alternative” signaling route, known as the beta-arrestin pathway, whose activity can have different effects depending on the type of brain cell involved. Some drugs that normally bind to the delta opioid receptor and have little or no effect on the beta-arrestin pathway turned out to strongly activate this pathway in a few of these mutant receptors.

In practical terms, these findings suggests a number of ways in which new drugs could target these receptors—and not only delta opioid receptors but also the other two “classical” opioid receptors, mu and kappa opioid receptors. “The sodium site architecture and the way it works seems essentially the same for all three of these opioid receptor types,” said Fenalti.

How the brain makes myelination activity-dependent

A major question regarding how axons acquire a coat of myelin, is the role of spiking activity. It is known that in culture systems oligodendrocytes will at least try to wrap anything that feels like an axon—even dead axons and artificial tubes. As axons acquire additional layers of myelin they conduct signals faster, and presumably become more efficient. It would therefore seem logical that the nervous system should apportion the most myelin to those neurons that are seeing the greatest activity. In that way the brain gets the most bang for its buck, energetically speaking. A new study in PLOS Biology suggests that while myelination is in many cases activity-independent at first, neurons can significantly ramp things up by flipping various molecular switches, one which appears to be Neuregulin (NRG).

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Unpacking the toolkit of human consciousness

No matter how different they seem — the learned and contemplative neuroscientist versus the toy orangutan with a penchant for off-color jokes — almost any adult who experiences them knows that Princeton University professor Michael Graziano is the voice behind his simian puppet Kevin. Yet to most listeners, Kevin — who acts as the comic relief when Graziano publicly presents his work — nonetheless has a distinct personality and consciousness — he seems aware of and comments on his surroundings in his own unique way.

While Kevin is not “real” in the sense of being an animate biological being, Graziano, a professor of psychology and the Princeton Neuroscience Institute, suggests that humans attribute consciousness to the puppet in the same way that we attribute consciousness to each other and to ourselves. Graziano has developed a new theory of consciousness he calls the “attention schema theory” that suggests that specialized systems in the human brain compute information about the things of which a person is aware, and project the property of consciousness onto ourselves and others. In that sense, the puppet’s consciousness is every bit as real as that of anyone wincingly laughing at his jokes about living atop Graziano’s hand.

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Findings Could Help Explain Origins of Human Limb Control

We might have more in common with a lamprey than we think, according to a new Northwestern University study on locomotion. At its core, the study of transparent zebrafish addresses a fundamental evolution issue: How did we get here?

Neuroscientists Martha W. Bagnall and David L. McLean have found that the spinal cord circuits that produce body bending in swimming fish are more complicated than previously thought.

Vertebrate locomotion has evolved from the simple left-right bending of the body exemplified by lampreys to the appearance of fins in bony fish to the movement of humans, with the complex nerve and muscle coordination necessary to move four limbs.

Bagnall and McLean report that differential control of an animal’s musculature — the basic template for controlling more complex limbs — is already in place in the spinal networks of simple fish. Neural circuits in zebrafish are completely segregated: individual neurons map to specific muscles.

Specifically, the neural circuits that drive muscle movement on the dorsal (or back) side are separate from the neural circuits activating muscles on the ventral (or front) side. This is in addition to the fish being able to separately control the left and right sides of its body [Video]

Ultimately, understanding more about how fish swim will allow scientists to figure out how humans walk.

“Evolution builds on pre-existing patterns, and this is a critical piece of the puzzle,” McLean said. “Our data help clarify how the transition from water to land could have been accomplished by simple changes in the connections of spinal networks.”

The findings will be published Jan. 10 in the journal Science. McLean, an assistant professor of neurobiology in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, and Bagnall, a postdoctoral fellow in his research group who made the discovery, are authors of the paper.

“This knowledge will put us in a better position to devise more effective therapies for when things go wrong with neural circuits in humans, such as spinal cord damage,” McLean said. “If you want to fix something, you have to know how it works in the first place. Given that the fish spinal cord works in a similar fashion to our own, this makes it a fantastic model system for research.”

McLean and Bagnall studied the motor neurons of baby zebrafish because the fish develop quickly and are see-through. They used state-of-art imaging techniques to monitor and manipulate neuronal activity in the fish.

“You can stare right into the nervous system,” McLean said. “It’s quite remarkable.”

The separate circuits for moving the left and right and top and bottom of the fish allow the animal to twist its body upright when it senses that it has rolled too far to one side or the other.

“This arrangement is perfectly suited to provide rapid postural control during swimming,” Bagnall said. “Importantly, this ancestral pattern of spinal cord organization may also represent an early functional template for the origins of limb control.”

Separate control of dorsal and ventral muscles in the fish body is a possible predecessor to separate control of extensors and flexors in human limbs. By tweaking the connections between these circuits as they elaborated during evolution, it is easier to explain how more complicated patterns of motor coordination in the limbs and trunk could have arisen during dramatic evolutionary changes in the vertebrate body plan, the researchers said.

“We are teasing apart basic components of locomotor circuits,” McLean said. “The molecular mechanisms responsible for building spinal circuits are conserved in all animals, so this study provides a nice hypothesis that scientists can test.”