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ByLauranNeergaard TheAssociatedPress WASHINGTON New re- search suggests it may be possible to predict which preschoolers will strug- gle to read — and it has to do with how the brain de- ciphers speech when it's noisy. Scientists are looking for ways to tell, as young as possible, when children are at risk for later learning difficulties so they can get early interventions. There are some simple pre-read- ing assessments for pre- schoolers. But Northwest- ern University researchers went further and analyzed brain waves of children as young as 3. How well youngsters' brains recognize specific sounds — consonants — amid background noise can help identify who is more likely to have trouble with reading development, the team reported Tuesday in the journal PLOS Biology. If the approach pans out, it may provide "a biological looking glass," said study senior author Nina Kraus, director of Northwestern's Auditory Neuroscience Lab- oratory. "If you know you have a 3-year-old at risk, you can as soon as possible begin to enrich their life in sound so that you don't lose those crucial early develop- mental years." Connecting sound to meaning is a key founda- tion for reading. For exam- ple, preschoolers who can match sounds to letters earlier go on to read more easily. Auditory processing is part of that pre-reading development: If your brain is slower to distinguish a "D" from a "B" sound, for example, then recognizing words and piecing together sentences could be affected, too. What does noise have to do with it? It stresses the system, as the brain has to tune out competing sounds to selectively focus, in just fractions of milliseconds. And consonants are more vulnerable to noise than vowels, which tend to be louder and longer, Kraus explained. "Hearing in noise is ar- guably one of the most com- putationally difficult things we ask our brain to do," she said. The new study used an EEG to directly mea- sure the brain's response to sound, attaching elec- trodes to children's scalps and recording the patterns of electric activity as nerve cells fired. The youngsters sat still to watch a video of their choice, listening to the soundtrack in one ear while an earpiece in the other periodically piped in the sound "dah" superimposed over a babble of talking. Measuring how the brain's circuitry responded, the team developed a model to predict children's per- formance on early literacy tests. Then they did a se- ries of experiments with 112 kids between the ages of 3 and 14. The 30-minute test pre- dicted how well 3-year-olds performed a language-de- velopment skill and how those same youngsters fared a year later on sev- eral standard pre-reading assessments, the team re- ported. Time will tell how well those children eventu- ally read. But Kraus' team also tested older children — and the EEG scores correlated with their current reading competence in school, and even flagged a small num- ber who'd been diagnosed with learning disabilities. Oral language expo- sure is one of the drivers of reading development, and the study is part of a broader push to find ways to spot problem signs early, said Brett Miller, who over- sees reading disabilities re- search at the National In- stitute of Child Health and Human Development, which helped fund the work. But don't expect EEGs for preschoolers any time soon. While the machines are common among brain spe- cialists, this particular use is complicated and expen- sive, and further research is necessary, Kraus cautioned. Her ultimate goal is to test how a child's brain pro- cesses sound even younger, maybe one day as a part of the routine newborn hear- ing screening. RESEARCH St ud y: E ar ly c lu e to w hy s om e children may have reading woes By Mike Stobbe The Associated Press NEWYORK The geographic areas where Lyme disease is a bigger danger have grown dramatically, according to a new government study pub- lished Wednesday U.S. cases remain con- centrated in the Northeast and upper Midwest. But now more areas in those regions are considered high risk. "The risk is expanding, in all directions," said the lead author, Kiersten Kugeler of the Centers for Disease Con- trol and Prevention. There are now 260 coun- ties where the number of Lyme disease cases is at least twice what's expected, given the size of each coun- ty's population. That's up from 130 a decade earlier, the report shows. Lyme disease is most common in wooded subur- ban and far suburban coun- ties. Scientists aren't sure why high-risk areas are ex- panding, but it likely has something to do with devel- opment and other changes that cause the deer and ticks that carry the bacte- ria to move, Kugeler said. Overall, 17 states have high-risk counties. The en- tire state of Connecticut, where the illness was first identified in 1975, has been high-risk for decades. Now, high-risk zones encompass nearly all of Massachusetts and New Hampshire and more than half of Maine and Vermont. Other states that saw ex- pansion of high-risk areas include Virginia, Pennsyl- vania and New York along the Eastern seaboard, and Iowa, Michigan and Minne- sota in the Midwest. The disease is transmit- ted through the bites of in- fected deer ticks, which can be about the size of a poppy seed. Symptoms include a fe- ver, headache and fatigue and sometimes a telltale rash that looks like a bull's- eye on the tick bite. Most people recover with antibi- otics. If left untreated, the infection can cause arthri- tis and more severe prob- lems. About 20,000 to 30,000 U.S. cases are reported each year, but experts say there actually are as many as 10 times more. Some counties have dropped off the high-risk list, including those in Vir- ginia, Georgia, Missouri and North Carolina where significant clusters were re- ported in the 1990s. Scien- tists now think those were a different condition caused by a different tick's bite, Kugeler said. The article was published online in a CDC journal, Emerging Infectious Dis- eases. HEALTH High-risk areas for Lyme disease growing By Lauran Neergaard The Associated Press WASHINGTON Alzheimer's has ravaged generations of Dean DeMoe's family — his grandmother, father, siblings — all in their 40s and 50s. DeMoe himself inher- ited the culprit gene mu- tation and at 53, the North Dakota man volunteers for a drug study he hopes one day will end the family's burden. International scientists gathering in Washington for a conference this week express cautious optimism that they may finally be on the right track to fight Al- zheimer's, a disease that already affects more than 5 million people in the United States and is ex- pected to more than dou- ble by 2050 as the popula- tion ages. Families like DeMoe's with the very rarest form of Alzheimer's, young and inherited, hold cru- cial clues to fighting this brain-destroying disease in everyone. On Saturday, research- ers for the first time brought together dozens of these families — pa- tients, patients-to-be and their healthy loved ones — from as far as Austra- lia and Britain to meet face to face. They shared advice about when their children should undergo gene test- ing to learn their own fate, and they got an unusual opportunity to grill gov- ernment and drug com- pany officials about why it's taking so long to find a good treatment. "Finally, I got to talk to other people who are going through the same thing," said DeMoe, of Thompson, North Dakota, who with four other siblings inher- ited the family's bad gene. One sister was spared. His wife, Deb, said he experiences early memory changes known as mild cognitive impairment, but DeMoe still holds a job with an oil company and said, "I don't dwell on it." Families' first question: Why not try to fix the gene defect that causes this form of Alzheimer's instead of targeting its downstream effects? Why, asked oth- ers, can't desperate fami- lies get faster access to ex- perimental drugs, as AIDS patients once did? "It's time to ease our an- guish," said Tal Cohen of Calabasas, California. At age 37, his wife, Giedre, already is in the mild- to-moderate stage of Al- zheimer's. He emerged hopeful that researchers are con- sidering creative ways to speed that access. "We don't have any more time to wait and see," he said. Alzheimer's usually strikes older adults, af- fecting about 1 in 9 people age 65 or over. Less than 1 percent of cases world- wide are the autosomal dominant form, caused by inheriting a gene with a particular mutation that triggers the disease well before the senior years. Children of an affected parent have a 50 percent chance of inheriting their family's bad gene. But if they do, they almost al- ways get sick about the same time their parent did. Many of these fami- lies are part of the Dom- inantly Inherited Al- zheimer Network (DIAN) study that monitors the health of family gene car- riers and their healthy rel- atives in several countries. Recently, it showed that si- lent changes in the brain can precede the first mem- ory problems by 20 years. Now scientists think the best hope against Alzheim- er's is to treat high-risk people long before symp- toms appear, aiming to at least stall the disease if not prevent it. On Sunday, research- ers at the Alzheimer's As- sociation International Conference reported pos- sible new ways to predict who will get sick with the more common late-on- set Alzheimer's — vital to testing such treatments — and a single test prob- ably won't be enough, said Johns Hopkins University neuroscientist Marilyn Al- bert. —Tracking about 350 people starting in middle age, Albert's team found a combination of tests predicted development of mild cognitive impair- ment within five years. They include a spinal tap to measure toxic levels of Alzheimer's hallmark amy- loid and tau proteins; MRI scans to detect shrinking brain regions; and two standard memory assess- ments. The combination isn't ready for doctors' of- fices, but should help drug companies tell who to en- roll in early-stage treat- ment studies, she said. —Scientists at VU Uni- versity Medical Center in Amsterdam found an- other protein, named neu- rogranin, in spinal fluid. It may signal that connec- tions called synapses are dying, making it harder for brain cells to commu- nicate. —Researchers at the University of Alberta, Canada, are beginning to hunt a saliva test for ear- lier markers of cognitive decline. But knowing who is des- tined for Alzheimer's and approximately when it will strike makes rare fami- lies such as DeMoe's espe- cially critical for research. A second DIAN study now is testing whether either of two experimental drugs might give those gene car- riers more symptom-free years by fighting buildup of sticky amyloid in the brain. That study soon will expand to test additional drugs. "The goal here really is to get drugs approved to help everyone," said Dr. Randall Bateman of Washington University in St. Louis, who oversees the DIAN drug study. Dean DeMoe pins his hopes on the drug study. "It might not do good for me," he said, "but it's im- portant for my family and for everyone." HEALTH Families hit by rare early Alzheimer's push for research AUDITORYNEUROSCIENCELAB,NORTHWESTERNUNIVERSITY Scalp electrodes pick up how children's brains react to sounds such as speech in a noisy background. New research suggests it may be possible to predict which preschoolers will struggle to read, and it has to do with how they decipher speech when it's noisy. Northwestern University researchers analyzed brain waves of children as young as 3. By Kristen Wyatt The Associated Press DENVER The federal health care law doesn't infringe on the religious freedom of faith-based nonprofit orga- nizations that object to cov- ering birth control in em- ployee health plans, a fed- eral appeals court in Denver ruled Tuesday. The case involves a group of Colorado nuns and four Christian colleges in Okla- homa. Religious groups are al- ready exempt from cover- ing contraceptives. But the plaintiffs argued that the exemption doesn't go far enough because they must sign away the coverage to another party, making them feel complicit in pro- viding the contraceptives. The 10th Circuit Court of Appeals disagreed. The judges wrote that the law with the exemption does not burden the exercise of religion. "Although we recognize and respect the sincerity of plaintiffs' beliefs and ar- guments, we conclude the accommodation scheme ... does not substantially bur- den their religious exer- cise," the three-judge panel wrote. The same court ruled last year that for-profit compa- nies can join the exempted religious organizations and not provide the contracep- tives. The U.S. Supreme Court later agreed with the 10th Circuit in the case brought by the Hobby Lobby arts-and-crafts chain. The birth-control rule has been among the most divisive aspects of the health care overhaul. Some advocates for women praise the mandate, but some reli- gious groups have decried it as an attack on religious freedom. The Denver nuns, called the Little Sisters of the Poor, run more than two dozen nursing homes for impover- ished seniors. Two years ago the U.S. Supreme Court of- fered the nuns a short-term reprieve on the exemption pending their appeal. While the Hobby Lobby faced the prospect of fines for not providing coverage, the judges noted, the non- profits must only file for an exemption, making the bur- den less substantial. The judges called the health law's accommoda- tion for religious objectors adequate. "The accommodation re- lieves plaintiffs from com- plying with the mandate and guarantees they will not have to provide, pay for, or facilitate contracep- tive coverage," the judges wrote. BIRTH CONTROL Co ur t: H ea lt h la w do es n' t in fr in ge o n re li gi ou s fr ee dom Serving Red Bluff for 30 years Look to us for Expert Eye Care. 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