A comprehensive analysis increases from 10 to 26 the number of genes linked with lung cancer, the leading cause of cancer deaths worldwide. The new study also identifies new cellular pathways that can trigger these malignancies.
“This study gives us insights that we didn’t have before,” says oncologist Ramaswamy Govindan of Washington University in St. Louis, who was not involved in the study. “Lung cancer is many different things cobbled together,” he says. “Now we’re able to untangle the different types.”
Researchers at Washington University, Baylor College of Medicine in Houston and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in Cambridge, Mass., have been collaborating on the Tumor Sequencing Project. These scientists analyzed DNA sequences from tumors in 188 people with adenocarcinoma, the most common form of lung cancer. Because of this large sample size, researchers had the statistical power needed not only to find genes that are associated with this cancer, but also to compare the particular groupings of gene mutations present in the tumors. The findings appear in the Oct. 23 Nature.
The data offer yet another reason not to smoke: Tumors from nonsmokers exhibited a maximum of four mutations; the max in smokers’ tumors was 49. “This clearly shows that cigarette smoking induces mutations,” says Li Ding of Washington University, a coauthor of the new study.
It’s well known that cigarettes are the leading cause of lung cancer. Yet about 10 percent of lung cancers occur in people who never smoked. When researchers in the new study compared the types of genes that underwent mutations, they found that some genes were mutated primarily in nonsmokers, while other genes were more likely to be mutated in smokers.
What triggers tumors is very different in smokers and nonsmokers, concludes Govindan.
Moreover, not all suspect genes turned out to be big players.
Two genes that affect tumor growth, KRAS and TP53, did turn out to be instrumental. These genes were mutated in more than 30 percent of the tumors in this new genetic snapshot of a broad population of lung-cancer patients. Yet coauthor David Wheeler from Baylor notes that some genes implicated in cancer formation, like PTEN, were seldom mutated.
Just because a mutation can cause cancer doesn’t mean it actually does, Wheeler points out. Because this study provided a glimpse of actual tumors in a population, it could pinpoint the relative abundance of particular mutations.
The new study also identified genetic networks within cells that are critical to keeping them from turning cancerous. Ding said her team found that “most mutations are clustered in a few key signaling pathways.” Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire Researchers already knew that some of these pathways were involved in lung cancer formation, but other pathways, like a network of genes known to regulate human development, were a surprise.
“This study unearthed novel mutations that force us to think about specific treatments,” says Govindan. He points to the example of the gene EGFR, which is mutated in some adenocarcinomas. Patients with this gene mutation respond very well to treatments with a specific drug. http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.NET It’s becoming clear, he says, that for effective treatment, “The key is to mold these drugs to the type of cancer.”
Newly identified mutations in both individual genes and large genetic pathways are potential drug targets. As a result, Ding predicts, more pathway-based treatments “will emerge quickly” from studies like these.
Saturday, May 2, 2009
Sunday, April 12, 2009
paradigm 2.par.003 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
By reading through a list of procedures aloud and checking them off before and after an operation, hospital surgical teams reduce patient complications by more than one-third, a new study finds. In low-income countries, using the checklist also seems to halve in-hospital deaths due to these complications, an international group of scientists reports in a study published online January 14 by the New England Journal of Medicine.Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Results from investigations since the 1990s into medical errors spurred the World Health Organization in 2008 to release a checklist designed to limit surgical complications. In the new study, researchers analyzed complication rates in surgical patients at eight hospitals before and after operating teams began using the checklist.Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
The WHO checklist includes such items as verifying the patient’s identity and surgery site before anesthesia, reviewing the use of antibiotics and the key surgical steps before the first cut, and accounting for all instruments and sponges afterward. http://LOUIS2J2SHEEHAN.US
“Surgical care in any hospital is complex and chaotic,” says anesthesiologist Alex Macario of Stanford University, who did not participate in the study. “Checklists help ensure that everyone is on the same page.” Even so, the use of checklists isn’t typically taught in medical schools, he says. “And it is a big cultural change to adopt them consistently at any facility.”
While the use of such surgical checklists appears to be on the rise, their prevalence is unknown.
In the new study, researchers documented any in-hospital complications occurring in 3,733 patients at major hospitals in four low-income countries — India, Tanzania, Jordan and the Philippines — and in four higher-income countries — the United States, Britain, New Zealand and Canada. Roughly half of the patients at each site underwent surgery before the checklist was in use, and half got surgery with a checklist being read aloud in the room.
Complications occurred in 11 percent of patients getting surgery by teams operating without a checklist, compared with only 7 percent of patients whose operating team used one.
Checklist use halved death rates, from 2 to 1 percent, in the low-income countries. Death rates in high-income countries didn’t change substantially with implementation of the checklist.
Procedure checklists are used by crews on airplanes and submarines and at nuclear power plants, points out study coauthor Alex Haynes, a surgeon and researcher at the Harvard School of Public Health and Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. But he cautions that the surgical checklist “isn’t just a piece of paper. It’s a team exercise involving verbalization of performance and sharing of information.” It’s not that people in operating rooms don’t speak to each other, he says. “But there should be a formal time when this happens.”http://LOUIS2J2SHEEHAN.US
Anesthesiologist Peter Pronovost of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore notes that surgical teams and other professional crews can grow weary of going over procedures. “They call it checklist fatigue,” he says. For that reason, he says, “you have to make sure the elements on the list are relevant to your work area.” So while the WHO guidelines are worth using, some surgeries — such as those involving children or cardiac patients — would require specific entries on a checklist that are not appropriate for other surgeries, he says.http://LOUIS2J2SHEEHAN.US
Haynes agrees and points out that the WHO checklist provides a baseline. “It’s quite likely that modifications can and should be made to the checklist for specific environments and situations,” he says.
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Comments 2 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
* A Probable Natural Paradigm...
From "How Decisions Are Made Within The OCM (outer cell membrane)"
http://www.physforum.com/index.php?showtopic=14988&st=180&#entry325606
... the genome behaves not as being presided by a decider President Gene, but by innate complete credence to each and every member of the cooperative genome commune of its genes membership, thus accepting a priori the decision of the individual member, but But BUt BUT coupling this with a very elaborate system of crisscross checklisting of this decision by other members of the genome.
Dov Henis Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Results from investigations since the 1990s into medical errors spurred the World Health Organization in 2008 to release a checklist designed to limit surgical complications. In the new study, researchers analyzed complication rates in surgical patients at eight hospitals before and after operating teams began using the checklist.Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
The WHO checklist includes such items as verifying the patient’s identity and surgery site before anesthesia, reviewing the use of antibiotics and the key surgical steps before the first cut, and accounting for all instruments and sponges afterward. http://LOUIS2J2SHEEHAN.US
“Surgical care in any hospital is complex and chaotic,” says anesthesiologist Alex Macario of Stanford University, who did not participate in the study. “Checklists help ensure that everyone is on the same page.” Even so, the use of checklists isn’t typically taught in medical schools, he says. “And it is a big cultural change to adopt them consistently at any facility.”
While the use of such surgical checklists appears to be on the rise, their prevalence is unknown.
In the new study, researchers documented any in-hospital complications occurring in 3,733 patients at major hospitals in four low-income countries — India, Tanzania, Jordan and the Philippines — and in four higher-income countries — the United States, Britain, New Zealand and Canada. Roughly half of the patients at each site underwent surgery before the checklist was in use, and half got surgery with a checklist being read aloud in the room.
Complications occurred in 11 percent of patients getting surgery by teams operating without a checklist, compared with only 7 percent of patients whose operating team used one.
Checklist use halved death rates, from 2 to 1 percent, in the low-income countries. Death rates in high-income countries didn’t change substantially with implementation of the checklist.
Procedure checklists are used by crews on airplanes and submarines and at nuclear power plants, points out study coauthor Alex Haynes, a surgeon and researcher at the Harvard School of Public Health and Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. But he cautions that the surgical checklist “isn’t just a piece of paper. It’s a team exercise involving verbalization of performance and sharing of information.” It’s not that people in operating rooms don’t speak to each other, he says. “But there should be a formal time when this happens.”http://LOUIS2J2SHEEHAN.US
Anesthesiologist Peter Pronovost of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore notes that surgical teams and other professional crews can grow weary of going over procedures. “They call it checklist fatigue,” he says. For that reason, he says, “you have to make sure the elements on the list are relevant to your work area.” So while the WHO guidelines are worth using, some surgeries — such as those involving children or cardiac patients — would require specific entries on a checklist that are not appropriate for other surgeries, he says.http://LOUIS2J2SHEEHAN.US
Haynes agrees and points out that the WHO checklist provides a baseline. “It’s quite likely that modifications can and should be made to the checklist for specific environments and situations,” he says.
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Comments 2 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
* A Probable Natural Paradigm...
From "How Decisions Are Made Within The OCM (outer cell membrane)"
http://www.physforum.com/index.php?showtopic=14988&st=180&#entry325606
... the genome behaves not as being presided by a decider President Gene, but by innate complete credence to each and every member of the cooperative genome commune of its genes membership, thus accepting a priori the decision of the individual member, but But BUt BUT coupling this with a very elaborate system of crisscross checklisting of this decision by other members of the genome.
Dov Henis Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
disorder seeing 5.dis.002 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
People diagnosed with the mental ailment known as borderline personality disorder hemorrhage emotion. Real or perceived rejections, losses or even minor slights trigger depression and other volatile reactions that can lead to suicide.
New brain-imaging research suggests that in people with borderline personality disorder, specific neural circuits foster extreme emotional oversensitivity and an inability to conceive of other people as having both positive and negative qualities.
Psychiatrist Harold Koenigsberg of Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City described his team’s results January 17 in New York City at the winter meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association.
“I suspect that in social situations, people with this disorder activate the brain in unique ways,” Koenigsberg says.http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.US
Koenigsberg’s findings unveil brain networks that may underlie the “faulty brakes” that borderline personality patients attempt to apply to their emotional reactions, remarks psychiatrist John Oldham of Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. It’s not yet clear whether the types of brain activity observed in the new study also occur in any of a handful of other personality disorders, Oldham adds. http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.US
Borderline personality disorder affects one in five psychiatric patients. It most frequently affects women, especially those who are also depressed, and men who also display violent and criminal tendencies classed as antisocial personality disorder. About one in 10 people with borderline personality disorder commit suicide. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire This condition is extremely difficult to treat, Koenigsberg notes.
His group first tested 19 adults diagnosed with borderline personality disorder and 17 others who had no serious psychiatric conditions. Participants reclined in a functional MRI scanner as they viewed five pleasant images — such as a laughing man playing with two children — and five disturbing images, including a scowling man assaulting a young woman. Each image appeared for six seconds.
Compared with emotionally healthy volunteers, borderline personality disorder patients displayed markedly heightened blood flow — a marker of neural activity — in the brain’s chief visual area as well as in the amygdala, a key structure in emotion regulation. Visual and emotional areas are closely connected in the brain.
This finding fits with earlier evidence that borderline personality disorder patients detect brief emotional expressions on others’ faces that, typically, emotionally healthy people do not notice. “Borderline patients may have a visual system that lets them see others’ facial emotions through a high-powered lens,” Koenigsberg says.
In a second functional MRI experiment, the researchers asked 18 borderline personality disorder patients and 16 emotionally healthy volunteers to view a series of emotionally neutral images and disturbing images. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire On some trials, participants were asked to simply look at the images; on others, participants tried to assume the role of a detached observer.Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
As detached observers of disturbing scenes, emotionally healthy participants displayed pronounced activity in brain areas that have been implicated in regulating attention and in resolving internal conflicts between competing impulses or choices. Borderline personality disorder patients showed almost no activity in those brain regions when trying to take a detached perspective.
Most people have an important capacity for resolving conflict: the ability to perceive both favorable and negative aspects of the same person. Lacking this skill, borderline patients find it easier to veer back and forth between regarding those they know as either wonderful or awful, Koenigsberg suggests.
His findings follow another team’s 2008 report that borderline patients, compared with healthy volunteers, fail to recognize when unfair transactions take place in an economic cooperation game and lack neural reactions in an area linked to trusting others.
“We can’t say to what extent brain changes in borderline personality disorder are inherited or acquired,” Koenigsberg says. Some genetic variants promote depression only in those who experience childhood abuse or trauma, a pattern that may also apply to borderline personality disorder, he hypothesizes. Borderline patients often report having endured childhood physical or sexual abuse.
Koenigsberg’s team is now repeating its functional MRI experiments with avoidant personality disorder patients, people who feel highly anxious around others and avoid personal contact.
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Comments 6 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
* Knowing somebody who appears to have BPD and seeing how much damage the person has caused, I believe research on this disease is really important. Something has got to be done to help diagnose and treat more of these people. While not all of them are really destructive, between those who attempt suicide and ruin their own lives and those who act out and attack their families and people around them, they do huge amounts of damage.
One writer tried to estimate the cost of BPD in the US today just from economic impact and came up with around $50 to $150 billion per year.
New brain-imaging research suggests that in people with borderline personality disorder, specific neural circuits foster extreme emotional oversensitivity and an inability to conceive of other people as having both positive and negative qualities.
Psychiatrist Harold Koenigsberg of Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City described his team’s results January 17 in New York City at the winter meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association.
“I suspect that in social situations, people with this disorder activate the brain in unique ways,” Koenigsberg says.http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.US
Koenigsberg’s findings unveil brain networks that may underlie the “faulty brakes” that borderline personality patients attempt to apply to their emotional reactions, remarks psychiatrist John Oldham of Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. It’s not yet clear whether the types of brain activity observed in the new study also occur in any of a handful of other personality disorders, Oldham adds. http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.US
Borderline personality disorder affects one in five psychiatric patients. It most frequently affects women, especially those who are also depressed, and men who also display violent and criminal tendencies classed as antisocial personality disorder. About one in 10 people with borderline personality disorder commit suicide. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire This condition is extremely difficult to treat, Koenigsberg notes.
His group first tested 19 adults diagnosed with borderline personality disorder and 17 others who had no serious psychiatric conditions. Participants reclined in a functional MRI scanner as they viewed five pleasant images — such as a laughing man playing with two children — and five disturbing images, including a scowling man assaulting a young woman. Each image appeared for six seconds.
Compared with emotionally healthy volunteers, borderline personality disorder patients displayed markedly heightened blood flow — a marker of neural activity — in the brain’s chief visual area as well as in the amygdala, a key structure in emotion regulation. Visual and emotional areas are closely connected in the brain.
This finding fits with earlier evidence that borderline personality disorder patients detect brief emotional expressions on others’ faces that, typically, emotionally healthy people do not notice. “Borderline patients may have a visual system that lets them see others’ facial emotions through a high-powered lens,” Koenigsberg says.
In a second functional MRI experiment, the researchers asked 18 borderline personality disorder patients and 16 emotionally healthy volunteers to view a series of emotionally neutral images and disturbing images. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire On some trials, participants were asked to simply look at the images; on others, participants tried to assume the role of a detached observer.Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
As detached observers of disturbing scenes, emotionally healthy participants displayed pronounced activity in brain areas that have been implicated in regulating attention and in resolving internal conflicts between competing impulses or choices. Borderline personality disorder patients showed almost no activity in those brain regions when trying to take a detached perspective.
Most people have an important capacity for resolving conflict: the ability to perceive both favorable and negative aspects of the same person. Lacking this skill, borderline patients find it easier to veer back and forth between regarding those they know as either wonderful or awful, Koenigsberg suggests.
His findings follow another team’s 2008 report that borderline patients, compared with healthy volunteers, fail to recognize when unfair transactions take place in an economic cooperation game and lack neural reactions in an area linked to trusting others.
“We can’t say to what extent brain changes in borderline personality disorder are inherited or acquired,” Koenigsberg says. Some genetic variants promote depression only in those who experience childhood abuse or trauma, a pattern that may also apply to borderline personality disorder, he hypothesizes. Borderline patients often report having endured childhood physical or sexual abuse.
Koenigsberg’s team is now repeating its functional MRI experiments with avoidant personality disorder patients, people who feel highly anxious around others and avoid personal contact.
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Comments 6 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
* Knowing somebody who appears to have BPD and seeing how much damage the person has caused, I believe research on this disease is really important. Something has got to be done to help diagnose and treat more of these people. While not all of them are really destructive, between those who attempt suicide and ruin their own lives and those who act out and attack their families and people around them, they do huge amounts of damage.
One writer tried to estimate the cost of BPD in the US today just from economic impact and came up with around $50 to $150 billion per year.
Saturday, April 11, 2009
incentives 0.inc.002 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
People offered several hundred dollars to quit smoking over the course of a year are three times more likely to kick the habit than those who receive counseling information but no financial reward, researchers report in the Feb. 12 New England Journal of Medicine.
Past studies awarding cash for quitting have yielded mixed results. Some of those studies had few participants and offered small rewards, says Kevin Volpp, an internist and health researcher at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine in Philadelphia. The new report, which he coauthored, “is the largest study that’s been done on financial incentives for smoking in a workplace setting,” he says. It also paid well.
Volpp and his colleagues teamed with General Electric to recruit 878 of the company’s employees who smoked. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire Half were randomly assigned to get $750 for quitting for at least nine months.
All study volunteers received information on local smoking-cessation programs.http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.US
Study volunteers assigned to get additional cash for quitting received $100 for completing one of these programs; $250 more if they had stopped smoking in the first three months; and $400 more if they were still nonsmokers six months after that.
Knowing the difficulties of stopping smoking, the researchers gave people in either group who failed to quit during the first three months of the study a second chance to quit and interviewed them again three months later. Among the incentive group, those who succeeded in kicking the habit at that point received the $250 cash reward and the final installment six months later, if still clean.http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.US
Researchers verified that people had quit by using a standard saliva test that reveals the presence of cotinine, a metabolite of nicotine. People using a nicotine patch or gum submitted a urine sample to verify that they hadn’t been smoking.
After nine or 12 months, nearly 15 percent of the incentive group had quit, compared with 5 percent of those not receiving the bonuses. Assessments done before and after these time points also showed benefits from the incentives (see chart).
“This was a really well-run study,” says psychologist Deborah Hennrikus of the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, who wasn’t involved in the research. She and her colleagues had found in earlier research that modest rewards of $10 and $25 could double smokers’ participation rates in cessation programs — but that the money had little effect on quit rates over time.
The long-term data at nine months are particularly important, Hennrikus says. “Most people fall off the wagon in the first week,” she says. “But you don’t expect a lot of relapses after six months.”
While about 70 percent of U.S. smokers say they want to quit, only about 2 to 3 percent do so in any given year, the study authors note. “Incentives provide a tangible reward for people to quit,” says Volpp. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire “Humans have a lot of trouble doing things solely for the sake of health benefits.”
Incentives can also work in people abusing illegal addictive drugs and to some extent in obese people trying to lose weight, says behavioral researcher Rebecca Donatelle of Oregon State University in Corvallis. She and her colleagues have recorded a cigarette quit rate of 34 percent at six months among low-income pregnant smokers — after offering the women a $50-per-month incentive for stopping.
“I think that incentives are basically the wave of the future,” Donatelle says. “When you think about it, $800 is a minimal investment [for stopping] something that will cost the health care system thousands in a lifetime.”
Past studies awarding cash for quitting have yielded mixed results. Some of those studies had few participants and offered small rewards, says Kevin Volpp, an internist and health researcher at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine in Philadelphia. The new report, which he coauthored, “is the largest study that’s been done on financial incentives for smoking in a workplace setting,” he says. It also paid well.
Volpp and his colleagues teamed with General Electric to recruit 878 of the company’s employees who smoked. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire Half were randomly assigned to get $750 for quitting for at least nine months.
All study volunteers received information on local smoking-cessation programs.http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.US
Study volunteers assigned to get additional cash for quitting received $100 for completing one of these programs; $250 more if they had stopped smoking in the first three months; and $400 more if they were still nonsmokers six months after that.
Knowing the difficulties of stopping smoking, the researchers gave people in either group who failed to quit during the first three months of the study a second chance to quit and interviewed them again three months later. Among the incentive group, those who succeeded in kicking the habit at that point received the $250 cash reward and the final installment six months later, if still clean.http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.US
Researchers verified that people had quit by using a standard saliva test that reveals the presence of cotinine, a metabolite of nicotine. People using a nicotine patch or gum submitted a urine sample to verify that they hadn’t been smoking.
After nine or 12 months, nearly 15 percent of the incentive group had quit, compared with 5 percent of those not receiving the bonuses. Assessments done before and after these time points also showed benefits from the incentives (see chart).
“This was a really well-run study,” says psychologist Deborah Hennrikus of the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, who wasn’t involved in the research. She and her colleagues had found in earlier research that modest rewards of $10 and $25 could double smokers’ participation rates in cessation programs — but that the money had little effect on quit rates over time.
The long-term data at nine months are particularly important, Hennrikus says. “Most people fall off the wagon in the first week,” she says. “But you don’t expect a lot of relapses after six months.”
While about 70 percent of U.S. smokers say they want to quit, only about 2 to 3 percent do so in any given year, the study authors note. “Incentives provide a tangible reward for people to quit,” says Volpp. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire “Humans have a lot of trouble doing things solely for the sake of health benefits.”
Incentives can also work in people abusing illegal addictive drugs and to some extent in obese people trying to lose weight, says behavioral researcher Rebecca Donatelle of Oregon State University in Corvallis. She and her colleagues have recorded a cigarette quit rate of 34 percent at six months among low-income pregnant smokers — after offering the women a $50-per-month incentive for stopping.
“I think that incentives are basically the wave of the future,” Donatelle says. “When you think about it, $800 is a minimal investment [for stopping] something that will cost the health care system thousands in a lifetime.”
Wednesday, January 7, 2009
agencies 4.age.011 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
long with slashed payrolls, rising foreclosures, and plummeting stock prices, 2008 brought another unwelcome development: a surge in bank robberies, which were up more than fifty per cent in New York. This wasn’t shocking: we typically expect property crimes to rise in hard economic times. There is, though, one crime against property which bucks this trend: defrauding investors. On Wall Street, fraudulent schemes tend to thrive during economic booms, and to blow up when times turn tough. While bank robbers are getting busier, the Bernard Madoffs are starting to get caught.
Madoff is just the latest in a long line of fraudsters who took advantage of investor euphoria. Time and again, as asset markets have become frothier, fraud has flourished. During England’s South Sea Bubble, in 1720, a host of bogus joint-stock companies arose, including one that described its enterprise as “nitvender,” or the selling of nothing. The boom of the nineteen-twenties featured men like Arthur Montgomery, who ran a Ponzi scheme promising investors four-hundred-per-cent returns in sixty days, and the Match King, Ivar Kreuger, who sustained match monopolies all over the world with forged bonds and doctored books. http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.INFO More recently, the stock-market bubble of the late nineties gave rise to enormous frauds at companies like Enron and WorldCom.
Fraud is a boom-time crime because it feeds on the faith of investors, and during bubbles that faith is overflowing. So while robbing a bank seems to be a demand-driven crime, robbing bank shareholders is all about supply. In the classic work on investor hysteria, “Manias, Panics, and Crashes,” the economist Charles Kindleberger wrote that during bubbles “the supply of corruption increases . . . much like the supply of credit.” This is more than a simple analogy: corruption and credit are stoked by the same forces. Cheap money engenders a surfeit of trust, and vice versa. http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.INFO(The word “credit” comes from the Latin for “believe.”) The same overconfidence that leads investors and lenders to underestimate the risks of legitimate investments also leads them to underestimate the likelihood of fraud. In Madoff’s case, for instance, his propensity for delivering inexplicably consistent returns month after month should have been a warning sign to his investors. But in the past few years besotted investors were willing to believe lots of foolish things—like the idea that housing prices would just keep going up.
An oversupply of credulity doesn’t last, of course; when the crash comes, and people get more cynical and cautious, the frauds are exposed. As Warren Buffett put it, “You only learn who’s been swimming naked when the tide goes out.” Did the share prices of Enron and WorldCom start plunging after their fraudulent actions came to light? Actually, it was the other way around: the financial mischief was exposed only after their stock prices tanked. In Madoff’s case, the steep across-the-board decline in asset prices curbed investors’ appetite for risk, so that many started to pull their money out. That effect may very well have forced Madoff to dispense more money than he could keep bringing in, especially since recruiting new investors, which you have to do to keep a Ponzi scheme going, would have become harder after the crash.
When the Madoff scandal erupted, some people argued that investor confidence would be further shaken—that the scandal would make America’s markets look more like Russia’s, notoriously rife with scams and suspicion. That hasn’t happened. After the Madoff story broke, the market jumped almost five per cent, and it’s now well above where it was when Madoff was arrested. One reason is that a stock market that lost seven trillion dollars in value in 2008 knows how to take a fifty-billion-dollar loss in stride. And Madoff was running money largely for an élite clientele, which gained access to his services primarily through inside connections, limiting the market-wide impact of his malfeasance.
But the main reason that Madoff didn’t destroy investor confidence is that it was already gone, thanks to a year when just about every institution that the market depends on—rating agencies, accounting firms, regulators, Wall Street C.E.O.s.—had messed up. The whole web of intermediaries and knowledge brokers that modern asset markets have come to rely on has become frayed. That helps explain the current credit crunch—bank lending has dropped fifty-five per cent this year—and the dismal state of the stock market. Discovering what the crooks have been up to is disillusioning, but not as disillusioning as coming to terms with what the so-called honest people did. http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.INFO
In David Mamet’s movie “House of Games,” the grifter played by Joe Mantegna explains to a former mark, “It’s called a confidence game. Why? Because you give me your confidence? No. Because I give you mine.” So the bankers gave us their confidence, in the form of mortgages and other forms of credit, and we gave them ours. This culture of credulity did plenty of damage to the economy, but now it has given way to something even more corrosive; namely, endemic mistrust. Because if there’s one thing worse than too much confidence it’s not enough. Fraud impoverishes a few; fear impoverishes the many. As long as mistrust prevails, people will keeping pulling money out of the system—sometimes even at gunpoint. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire.
Madoff is just the latest in a long line of fraudsters who took advantage of investor euphoria. Time and again, as asset markets have become frothier, fraud has flourished. During England’s South Sea Bubble, in 1720, a host of bogus joint-stock companies arose, including one that described its enterprise as “nitvender,” or the selling of nothing. The boom of the nineteen-twenties featured men like Arthur Montgomery, who ran a Ponzi scheme promising investors four-hundred-per-cent returns in sixty days, and the Match King, Ivar Kreuger, who sustained match monopolies all over the world with forged bonds and doctored books. http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.INFO More recently, the stock-market bubble of the late nineties gave rise to enormous frauds at companies like Enron and WorldCom.
Fraud is a boom-time crime because it feeds on the faith of investors, and during bubbles that faith is overflowing. So while robbing a bank seems to be a demand-driven crime, robbing bank shareholders is all about supply. In the classic work on investor hysteria, “Manias, Panics, and Crashes,” the economist Charles Kindleberger wrote that during bubbles “the supply of corruption increases . . . much like the supply of credit.” This is more than a simple analogy: corruption and credit are stoked by the same forces. Cheap money engenders a surfeit of trust, and vice versa. http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.INFO(The word “credit” comes from the Latin for “believe.”) The same overconfidence that leads investors and lenders to underestimate the risks of legitimate investments also leads them to underestimate the likelihood of fraud. In Madoff’s case, for instance, his propensity for delivering inexplicably consistent returns month after month should have been a warning sign to his investors. But in the past few years besotted investors were willing to believe lots of foolish things—like the idea that housing prices would just keep going up.
An oversupply of credulity doesn’t last, of course; when the crash comes, and people get more cynical and cautious, the frauds are exposed. As Warren Buffett put it, “You only learn who’s been swimming naked when the tide goes out.” Did the share prices of Enron and WorldCom start plunging after their fraudulent actions came to light? Actually, it was the other way around: the financial mischief was exposed only after their stock prices tanked. In Madoff’s case, the steep across-the-board decline in asset prices curbed investors’ appetite for risk, so that many started to pull their money out. That effect may very well have forced Madoff to dispense more money than he could keep bringing in, especially since recruiting new investors, which you have to do to keep a Ponzi scheme going, would have become harder after the crash.
When the Madoff scandal erupted, some people argued that investor confidence would be further shaken—that the scandal would make America’s markets look more like Russia’s, notoriously rife with scams and suspicion. That hasn’t happened. After the Madoff story broke, the market jumped almost five per cent, and it’s now well above where it was when Madoff was arrested. One reason is that a stock market that lost seven trillion dollars in value in 2008 knows how to take a fifty-billion-dollar loss in stride. And Madoff was running money largely for an élite clientele, which gained access to his services primarily through inside connections, limiting the market-wide impact of his malfeasance.
But the main reason that Madoff didn’t destroy investor confidence is that it was already gone, thanks to a year when just about every institution that the market depends on—rating agencies, accounting firms, regulators, Wall Street C.E.O.s.—had messed up. The whole web of intermediaries and knowledge brokers that modern asset markets have come to rely on has become frayed. That helps explain the current credit crunch—bank lending has dropped fifty-five per cent this year—and the dismal state of the stock market. Discovering what the crooks have been up to is disillusioning, but not as disillusioning as coming to terms with what the so-called honest people did. http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.INFO
In David Mamet’s movie “House of Games,” the grifter played by Joe Mantegna explains to a former mark, “It’s called a confidence game. Why? Because you give me your confidence? No. Because I give you mine.” So the bankers gave us their confidence, in the form of mortgages and other forms of credit, and we gave them ours. This culture of credulity did plenty of damage to the economy, but now it has given way to something even more corrosive; namely, endemic mistrust. Because if there’s one thing worse than too much confidence it’s not enough. Fraud impoverishes a few; fear impoverishes the many. As long as mistrust prevails, people will keeping pulling money out of the system—sometimes even at gunpoint. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire.
Tuesday, January 6, 2009
bosnia 6.bos.000300 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire. When Marci Needle and her husband began to contemplate divorce in June, they thought they had enough money to go their separate ways. They owned a million-dollar home near Atlanta and another in Jacksonville, Fla., as well as investment properties.http://louis5j5sheehan5esquire.wordpress.com/
Now the market for both houses has crashed, and the couple are left arguing about whether the homes are worth what they owe on them, and whether there are any assets left to divide, Ms. Needle said.
“We’re really trying very hard to be amicable, but it puts a strain on us,” said Ms. Needle, the friction audible in her voice. “I want him to buy me out. It’s in everybody’s interest to settle quickly. That would be my only income. It’s been incredibly stressful.” http://louis5j5sheehan5esquire.wordpress.com/
Chalk up another victim for the crashing real estate market: the easy divorce. http://louis5j5sheehan5esquire.wordpress.com/
With nearly one in six homes worth less than the mortgage owed on it, according to Moody’s Economy.com, divorce lawyers and financial advisers around the country say the logistics of divorce have been turned around. “We used to fight about who gets to keep the house,” said Gary Nickelson, president of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers. “Now we fight about who gets stuck with the dead cow.”
As a result, divorce has become more complicated and often more expensive, with lower prospects for money on the other side. Some divorce lawyers say that business has slowed or that clients are deciding to stay together because there are no assets left to help them start over.
“There’s an old joke,” said Randall M. Kessler, Ms. Needle’s lawyer. “Why is a divorce so expensive? Because it’s worth it. Now it better really be worth it.”
In a normal economy, couples typically build equity in their homes, then divide that equity in a divorce, either after selling the house or with one partner buying out the other’s share. But after the recent boom-and-bust cycle, more couples own houses that neither spouse can afford to maintain, and that they cannot sell for what they owe. For couples already under stress, the family home has become a toxic asset.
“It’s much harder to move on with their lives,” said Alton L. Abramowitz, a partner in the New York firm Mayerson Stutman Abramowitz Royer.
Mr. Abramowitz said he was in the middle of several cases where the value of the real estate could not be determined. “All of a sudden,” he said, “prices are all over the place, people aren’t closing, and it becomes virtually impossible to judge how far the market has fallen, because nothing is selling.”
For John and Laurel Goerke, in Santa Barbara, Calif., the housing market crashed in the middle of what Mr. Goerke said had been an orderly legal proceeding. http://louis5j5sheehan5esquire.wordpress.com/ At the height of the market, Mr. Goerke said, they had their house appraised at $2.3 million, which would have given them about $1 million to divide after paying off the mortgage. But by the time they sold last year, the value had fallen by $600,000, cutting their equity by more than half. http://louis5j5sheehan5esquire.wordpress.com/
“That changed everything,” said Mr. Goerke, who is now nearly two years into the divorce process, with legal and other fees of several hundred thousand dollars. “The prospect of us both being able to buy modest homes was eliminated. The money’s not there.”
Now, with both spouses living in rental properties, their lawyers still cannot agree on what their remaining assets are worth. Their wealth is ticking away at $350 an hour, times two.
“It’s got to end,” Mr. Goerke said, “because at some point there’s nothing left to argue about.”
For other couples it does not have to end. Lisa Decker, a certified divorce financial analyst in Atlanta, said she was seeing couples who were determined to stay together even after divorce because they could not sell their home, a phenomenon rarely seen before outside Manhattan.
“We’re finding the husband on one floor, the wife on the other,” Ms. Decker said. “Now one is coming home with a new boyfriend or girlfriend, and it’s creating a layer to relationships that we haven’t seen before. Unfortunately, we’re seeing ‘The War of the Roses’ for real, not just in a Hollywood movie.”
In California, James Hennenhoefer, a divorce lawyer, said couples were taking advantage of the housing crisis to save money by stopping their mortgage payments but continuing to live together for as long as they can.
“Most of the lenders around here are in complete disarray,” Mr. Hennenhoefer said. “They’re not as aggressive about evictions. Everyone’s hanging around in properties hoping the government will buy all that bad paper and then they’ll negotiate a new deal with the government. They just live in different parts of the house and say, ‘We’ll stay here for as long as we can, and save our money, so we have the ability to move when and if the sheriff comes to toss us out.’ ”
Mr. Hennenhoefer said this tactic worked only with first mortgages; on second and third mortgages, the lenders pursue repayment even after the homeowners have lost the home.
Dee Dee Tomasko, a nursing student and mother in suburban Cleveland, expected to leave her marriage with about $200,000 in starter money, primarily from the marital home, which was appraised at about $1 million in 2006. By the time of her divorce last year, however, the house was appraised at $800,000; her share of the equity came to about $105,000.
Though she is relieved to be out of the marriage, if she had known how little money she would get “I might have stuck with it a little more; I don’t know,” Ms. Tomasko said, adding, “Maybe it would’ve made me think a little harder.”
For divorcing spouses with resources, though, there can be opportunities in the falling housing market.
Josh Kaufman and his wife bought a new 6,500-square-foot house outside Cleveland on five and a half acres, with four bedrooms and two three-car garages, that was worth $1.5 million at the height of the market. When they divorced in June, Mr. Kaufman knew his wife could not afford to carry the home. The longer the divorce process continued, the more the house depreciated; by the time he assumed the house, its appraised value was half what the couple had put into it; he did not pay her anything for her share.
“From a negotiating standpoint we knew that she couldn’t afford to stay in it,” Mr. Kaufman said. “It appeared as an opportunity to turn the negative situation around. There was no emotion involved. It was a business decision on what made most financial sense. It wasn’t an attempt to take advantage of someone.”
Still, his lawyer, Andrew A. Zashin, said, “He bought this house at a bargain basement price.”
For Nancy R., who spoke on condition of anonymity because her colleagues do not know her marital status, the impediments to divorce are visible every time she opens her door.
“There’s three other houses for sale on our same road,” she said. “There’s no way our house would sell.”
For now the couple are separated, waiting for real estate prices to recover. But for Ms. R., that means remaining financially dependent on her husband. He moved out; she remains in the house.
“I still feel kept in certain ways, and I don’t want to rock the boat,” she said. “And it’s draining. So suddenly, when there’s an economic crunch, we’re paying for two places. And we’re both eating out more, because it’s no fun to eat alone.”
The same dynamics that marked their marriage now hang over their separation, she said: “He has the ultimate control.”
“We can’t sell the house,” she said, “and whatever settlement I get depends on a good relationship with him, based on his good will. The lines get blurry and confused quickly, which makes emotions fly easily” — especially if she were to start dating.
“Any icing on the cake is going to come from his good will,” she said, “and that means being the peacemaker. I’m the underdog in this situation. We’re basically forced to remain in a relationship after we’ve decided to end it.”
Now the market for both houses has crashed, and the couple are left arguing about whether the homes are worth what they owe on them, and whether there are any assets left to divide, Ms. Needle said.
“We’re really trying very hard to be amicable, but it puts a strain on us,” said Ms. Needle, the friction audible in her voice. “I want him to buy me out. It’s in everybody’s interest to settle quickly. That would be my only income. It’s been incredibly stressful.” http://louis5j5sheehan5esquire.wordpress.com/
Chalk up another victim for the crashing real estate market: the easy divorce. http://louis5j5sheehan5esquire.wordpress.com/
With nearly one in six homes worth less than the mortgage owed on it, according to Moody’s Economy.com, divorce lawyers and financial advisers around the country say the logistics of divorce have been turned around. “We used to fight about who gets to keep the house,” said Gary Nickelson, president of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers. “Now we fight about who gets stuck with the dead cow.”
As a result, divorce has become more complicated and often more expensive, with lower prospects for money on the other side. Some divorce lawyers say that business has slowed or that clients are deciding to stay together because there are no assets left to help them start over.
“There’s an old joke,” said Randall M. Kessler, Ms. Needle’s lawyer. “Why is a divorce so expensive? Because it’s worth it. Now it better really be worth it.”
In a normal economy, couples typically build equity in their homes, then divide that equity in a divorce, either after selling the house or with one partner buying out the other’s share. But after the recent boom-and-bust cycle, more couples own houses that neither spouse can afford to maintain, and that they cannot sell for what they owe. For couples already under stress, the family home has become a toxic asset.
“It’s much harder to move on with their lives,” said Alton L. Abramowitz, a partner in the New York firm Mayerson Stutman Abramowitz Royer.
Mr. Abramowitz said he was in the middle of several cases where the value of the real estate could not be determined. “All of a sudden,” he said, “prices are all over the place, people aren’t closing, and it becomes virtually impossible to judge how far the market has fallen, because nothing is selling.”
For John and Laurel Goerke, in Santa Barbara, Calif., the housing market crashed in the middle of what Mr. Goerke said had been an orderly legal proceeding. http://louis5j5sheehan5esquire.wordpress.com/ At the height of the market, Mr. Goerke said, they had their house appraised at $2.3 million, which would have given them about $1 million to divide after paying off the mortgage. But by the time they sold last year, the value had fallen by $600,000, cutting their equity by more than half. http://louis5j5sheehan5esquire.wordpress.com/
“That changed everything,” said Mr. Goerke, who is now nearly two years into the divorce process, with legal and other fees of several hundred thousand dollars. “The prospect of us both being able to buy modest homes was eliminated. The money’s not there.”
Now, with both spouses living in rental properties, their lawyers still cannot agree on what their remaining assets are worth. Their wealth is ticking away at $350 an hour, times two.
“It’s got to end,” Mr. Goerke said, “because at some point there’s nothing left to argue about.”
For other couples it does not have to end. Lisa Decker, a certified divorce financial analyst in Atlanta, said she was seeing couples who were determined to stay together even after divorce because they could not sell their home, a phenomenon rarely seen before outside Manhattan.
“We’re finding the husband on one floor, the wife on the other,” Ms. Decker said. “Now one is coming home with a new boyfriend or girlfriend, and it’s creating a layer to relationships that we haven’t seen before. Unfortunately, we’re seeing ‘The War of the Roses’ for real, not just in a Hollywood movie.”
In California, James Hennenhoefer, a divorce lawyer, said couples were taking advantage of the housing crisis to save money by stopping their mortgage payments but continuing to live together for as long as they can.
“Most of the lenders around here are in complete disarray,” Mr. Hennenhoefer said. “They’re not as aggressive about evictions. Everyone’s hanging around in properties hoping the government will buy all that bad paper and then they’ll negotiate a new deal with the government. They just live in different parts of the house and say, ‘We’ll stay here for as long as we can, and save our money, so we have the ability to move when and if the sheriff comes to toss us out.’ ”
Mr. Hennenhoefer said this tactic worked only with first mortgages; on second and third mortgages, the lenders pursue repayment even after the homeowners have lost the home.
Dee Dee Tomasko, a nursing student and mother in suburban Cleveland, expected to leave her marriage with about $200,000 in starter money, primarily from the marital home, which was appraised at about $1 million in 2006. By the time of her divorce last year, however, the house was appraised at $800,000; her share of the equity came to about $105,000.
Though she is relieved to be out of the marriage, if she had known how little money she would get “I might have stuck with it a little more; I don’t know,” Ms. Tomasko said, adding, “Maybe it would’ve made me think a little harder.”
For divorcing spouses with resources, though, there can be opportunities in the falling housing market.
Josh Kaufman and his wife bought a new 6,500-square-foot house outside Cleveland on five and a half acres, with four bedrooms and two three-car garages, that was worth $1.5 million at the height of the market. When they divorced in June, Mr. Kaufman knew his wife could not afford to carry the home. The longer the divorce process continued, the more the house depreciated; by the time he assumed the house, its appraised value was half what the couple had put into it; he did not pay her anything for her share.
“From a negotiating standpoint we knew that she couldn’t afford to stay in it,” Mr. Kaufman said. “It appeared as an opportunity to turn the negative situation around. There was no emotion involved. It was a business decision on what made most financial sense. It wasn’t an attempt to take advantage of someone.”
Still, his lawyer, Andrew A. Zashin, said, “He bought this house at a bargain basement price.”
For Nancy R., who spoke on condition of anonymity because her colleagues do not know her marital status, the impediments to divorce are visible every time she opens her door.
“There’s three other houses for sale on our same road,” she said. “There’s no way our house would sell.”
For now the couple are separated, waiting for real estate prices to recover. But for Ms. R., that means remaining financially dependent on her husband. He moved out; she remains in the house.
“I still feel kept in certain ways, and I don’t want to rock the boat,” she said. “And it’s draining. So suddenly, when there’s an economic crunch, we’re paying for two places. And we’re both eating out more, because it’s no fun to eat alone.”
The same dynamics that marked their marriage now hang over their separation, she said: “He has the ultimate control.”
“We can’t sell the house,” she said, “and whatever settlement I get depends on a good relationship with him, based on his good will. The lines get blurry and confused quickly, which makes emotions fly easily” — especially if she were to start dating.
“Any icing on the cake is going to come from his good will,” she said, “and that means being the peacemaker. I’m the underdog in this situation. We’re basically forced to remain in a relationship after we’ve decided to end it.”
Thursday, December 25, 2008
factors 7.fac.88 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Power has its perks, even for laboratory-housed monkeys. When moved from individual to group cages, socially dominant male monkeys exhibit a brain-chemistry change that fosters resistance to using drugs such as cocaine, a new study finds.
This alteration increases the amount of so-called dopamine D2 receptors, a molecular gateway on brain cells controlled by the chemical messenger dopamine.
Earlier studies implicated these receptors in pleasurable responses to drugs and other stimuli.http://louis7j7sheehan7esquire.wordpress.com
In contrast, male monkeys at the bottom of the social pecking order display no boost in the D2 receptors when housed with other monkeys, say neuroscientist Michael A. Nader of Wake Forest University School of Medicine in Winston-Salem, N.C., and his colleagues. Unlike their more dominant cage mates, the low-ranking monkeys readily self-administer large amounts of cocaine.
These findings raise the possibility that a person's vulnerability to drug abuse can be influenced by brain-altering environmental factors, Nader's group concludes in an upcoming Nature Neuroscience.
"This is the first demonstration in primates that a social stressor, such as a dominance hierarchy, can regulate levels of dopamine D2 receptors," remarks psychiatrist Nora D. Volkow of Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, N.Y. "It provides a potential biological mechanism to explain why people in lower social classes are generally at higher risk for drug abuse."
Nader and his coworkers used a scanning technique called positron emission tomography (PET) to study D2 receptors in the brains of 20 male macaque monkeys that had been housed in individual cages for 1� years. PET scans were repeated after the monkeys were moved into larger cages, grouping four animals per cage, and given time to establish social hierarchies.
The scans revealed comparably low numbers of dopamine D2 receptors in all individually housed monkeys and in low-ranking monkeys in the groups. In dominant monkeys, D2-receptor numbers increased sharply. These animals also displayed relatively low concentrations of dopamine in the junctions, or synapses, between brain cells.
Excess synaptic dopamine leads to an oversensitivity of the brain's reward pathway and creates a susceptibility to drug abuse, the researchers theorize.
Loss of control over environmental factors may have triggered such a dopamine pattern in low-ranking monkeys, they hold. When the scientists implanted intravenous lines, subordinate animals quickly learned to press a lever to receive infusions of cocaine in increasing doses and largely ignored a lever controlling delivery of saline solution.http://louis7j7sheehan7esquire.wordpress.com
In dominant monkeys, the surge in dopamine D2 receptors indicates they use dopamine efficiently for cell-to-cell communication, Nader's group contends. These monkeys showed no preference for receiving intravenous cocaine over a saline solution.http://louis7j7sheehan7esquire.wordpress.com
Whether these findings have correlates among people remains an open question, the researchers note. In line with the new study, earlier PET data indicated that people with low dopamine D2-receptor numbers report more pleasurable responses to stimulant drugs than those with high D2 numbers do. "We're going to have to start paying much closer attention to the social rank of individuals in studies of the biology of drug abuse," Volkow says.
This alteration increases the amount of so-called dopamine D2 receptors, a molecular gateway on brain cells controlled by the chemical messenger dopamine.
Earlier studies implicated these receptors in pleasurable responses to drugs and other stimuli.http://louis7j7sheehan7esquire.wordpress.com
In contrast, male monkeys at the bottom of the social pecking order display no boost in the D2 receptors when housed with other monkeys, say neuroscientist Michael A. Nader of Wake Forest University School of Medicine in Winston-Salem, N.C., and his colleagues. Unlike their more dominant cage mates, the low-ranking monkeys readily self-administer large amounts of cocaine.
These findings raise the possibility that a person's vulnerability to drug abuse can be influenced by brain-altering environmental factors, Nader's group concludes in an upcoming Nature Neuroscience.
"This is the first demonstration in primates that a social stressor, such as a dominance hierarchy, can regulate levels of dopamine D2 receptors," remarks psychiatrist Nora D. Volkow of Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, N.Y. "It provides a potential biological mechanism to explain why people in lower social classes are generally at higher risk for drug abuse."
Nader and his coworkers used a scanning technique called positron emission tomography (PET) to study D2 receptors in the brains of 20 male macaque monkeys that had been housed in individual cages for 1� years. PET scans were repeated after the monkeys were moved into larger cages, grouping four animals per cage, and given time to establish social hierarchies.
The scans revealed comparably low numbers of dopamine D2 receptors in all individually housed monkeys and in low-ranking monkeys in the groups. In dominant monkeys, D2-receptor numbers increased sharply. These animals also displayed relatively low concentrations of dopamine in the junctions, or synapses, between brain cells.
Excess synaptic dopamine leads to an oversensitivity of the brain's reward pathway and creates a susceptibility to drug abuse, the researchers theorize.
Loss of control over environmental factors may have triggered such a dopamine pattern in low-ranking monkeys, they hold. When the scientists implanted intravenous lines, subordinate animals quickly learned to press a lever to receive infusions of cocaine in increasing doses and largely ignored a lever controlling delivery of saline solution.http://louis7j7sheehan7esquire.wordpress.com
In dominant monkeys, the surge in dopamine D2 receptors indicates they use dopamine efficiently for cell-to-cell communication, Nader's group contends. These monkeys showed no preference for receiving intravenous cocaine over a saline solution.http://louis7j7sheehan7esquire.wordpress.com
Whether these findings have correlates among people remains an open question, the researchers note. In line with the new study, earlier PET data indicated that people with low dopamine D2-receptor numbers report more pleasurable responses to stimulant drugs than those with high D2 numbers do. "We're going to have to start paying much closer attention to the social rank of individuals in studies of the biology of drug abuse," Volkow says.
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