When an adult snores, it’s annoying. When a kid snores, it’s mostly cute. But as David Gozal, chairman of pediatrics at Comer Children’s Hospital explains, those nighttime noises aren’t always innocuous.

“Snoring is not benign in kids,” Gozal said. “Snoring is clearly something that we need to not just make fun of but actually think that it has consequences on learning, behavior, the cardiovascular system, and diabetes. It can also exacerbate many existing conditions associated with learning, intelligence and behavior.”

“Those effects are silent for the most part in children, but nevertheless, if let go for a long time, they can cause damage that could be irreversible and lead to onset of disease in adults earlier and more severe than otherwise would be appropriate.”

Yet while awareness and diagnosis of sleep disorders in adults has improved over recent years, the pediatric end of the field has lagged somewhat behind. Conducting an overnight sleep study - which involves a night in the hospital or sleep center bed attached to a multitude of wires - is unpleasant enough for adults; just try performing one on a sleep-deprived 8-year-old. The number of sleep technicians and doctors trained to record and analyze the unique characteristics of sleep in children is also a fraction of those available for adult studies, Gozal said. That means very few sleep centers are able to conduct sleep studies in children, which produces waiting lists as long as one year in some areas.

And yet, better screening technology is needed to sort out relatively harmless “primary snoring,” seen in around 1 out of every 10 kids, from the more harmful obstructive sleep apnea (OSA). Often associated with adult, overweight males, OSA reflects the occurrence of frequent breathing “pauses” during sleep, which may lead to as many as hundreds of  short episodes without oxygen and abrupt awakenings during a single night of sleep. Gozal’s research found that about 3 percent of children suffer from OSA, but the condition is often undiagnosed, and sometimes even treated (through surgical removal of the tonsils and adenoids) based upon mere reports of chronic snoring.

“This is not a trivial proposition,” Gozal said. “And yet because there’s so little choice, parents and physicians decide to pursue surgery because there’s not enough access to the diagnostic tool. If it were easy, and not as expensive and inconvenient, it would allow everybody to get tested and know whether you have sleep apnea or you don’t before going to surgery.”

That’s the kind of clinical problem that inspires creative science, and Gozal’s research group at his old home, the University of Louisville, and his new, the University of Chicago, have been working toward a simpler way of testing children for obstructive sleep apnea. Recognizing that OSA causes changes in kidney function in mice and humans, Gozal hypothesized that kids with sleep apnea could be identified due to differences in what comes out of their kidney: urine. By measuring the proteins from kids diagnosed with OSA and comparing their “urinary proteome” to kids without the sleep disorder, Gozal’s team hoped to identify candidate proteins that could be used in, simply put, a pee test for sleep apnea.

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A sleeping zebra finch (courtesy of Margoliash lab)

One of the repeated themes of the Darwin/Chicago 2009 meeting two weeks ago was the history of the anti-evolution movement, a resistance that has actually changed form, even *cough* evolved, quite a bit since The Origin of the Species. At the opening night event in Rockefeller Chapel, science historian Ronald Numbers talked about differences between the anti-Darwinists led by William Jennings Bryan in the 1920’s (immortalized in the Scopes Monkey Trial and Inherit the Wind) and today’s intelligent design supporters and creationists. Surprisingly, Bryan and his followers were considerably less extreme than today’s anti-evolutionists, as Numbers explained that most who railed against Darwinism in the early 20th century were fine with the evolution of animals over billions of years, they merely could not abide that humans also evolved.

The evolution vs. creation debate has obviously become a lot more complicated since then, but Bryan’s primary objection has lingered - the core of most people’s opposition to evolution is the idea that humans must be somehow separate and different from the rest of the natural world. One “proof” of this uniqueness is the complexity of human language, a form of communication that, to the casual observer, appears in an entirely different league from the songs, gestures, or simple noises that animals use to share information. The assumption that the more complex forms of human language are unique is even held by some in the field of linguistics and psychology, including the legendary Noam Chomsky, who argued as much in a 2002 Science paper with cognitive psychologist (and Darwin/Chicago speaker) Marc Hauser.

That assumption is a handicap to the study of language, argue University of Chicago’s Daniel Margoliash and Howard Nusbaum in a recent issue of the journal Trends in Cognitive Science. The idea that human language is biologically unique, and thus the kind of “hopeful monster” geneticist Richard Goldschmidt coined to describe the sudden appearance of a new feature in evolutionary history, walls off language from the world of biology. Perceiving human language in its proper evolutionary context, and thus exposing it to the tools of comparative biology, will allow scientists to fully understand how language works and where it originated, Margoliash and Nusbaum conclude.

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First of all: OUCH.

The rather painful X-ray to the left was taken from a 48-year-old patient who, it should be said immediately, survived his unfortunate encounter with a nail-gun and its 6-inch long projectile. But it’s what happened after the nail’s removal that merited the publication of this photograph in the medical journal The Lancet last month by University of Chicago doctors Babak Mokhlesi and Mohsin Khan.

Some time after the patient’s recovery from this very severe brain injury, he presented to the University of Chicago Sleep Disorders Center with hypersomnolence - sleeping, on average, 20 hours each day. The man’s sleep patterns were also unusual; he fell from the awake state into sleep faster, achieved REM sleep more rapidly than normal and woke up frequently during a 7-hour polysomnogram, or sleep test. Doctors were able to treat the man’s narcolepsy with methylphenidate (commonly known as Ritalin) and modafinil, two stimulants commonly prescribed to treat the disorder.

According to the article, the man’s hypersomnolence improved under medication. There was also a secondary side-effect of the gruesome injury - the man’s obsessive compulsive disorder “completely resolved.” read more

Our weekly roundup of interesting science from around the web:

"All the physicists in the house say yeah-yuh!" (courtesy Fermilab)

Where the Higgs At? A Particle Accelerator Rap Battle

CERN’s gigantic new Large Hadron Collider had a somewhat tough week, with New York Times reporter James Glantz comparing the $4 billion particle accelerator to an unfinished Mayan pyramid, “another grandiose structure with cosmic aspirations and earthbound problems that could thwart its ambitions.” Then, stateside particle accelerator owners Fermilab went and commissioned a rap response to the famously viral “Large Hadron Rap” performed by CERN employee Katherine McAlpine. Penned by science “rapbassador” Funky49, the Fermilab rap is not available for listening yet (Funky49 was in Batavia, IL recording the video this week, the Fermilab website reported), but you can use your imagination with the help of the lyrics. CERN and Fermilab hold fast to their status as friendly rivals (much to the annoyance of conflict-seeking science writers around the world), so Funky49’s rebuttal is hardly the particle physics version of Jay-Z laying the verbal smackdown on Nas.

A Gene for Morning People

Many people who wish there were more hours in the day to get things done forget that almost a third of one’s time (if you’re lucky) is spent sleeping. But a select few lucky souls with a rare genetic mutation don’t need a full 8 hours to feel rested, a study published in Science this week revealed. When Univeristy of California-San Francisco researchers looked through their menagerie of people with odd sleeping habits, they stumbled upon a mother and daughter who require only 6 hours of sleep a night to wake up refreshed and shared a mutation in a gene called DEC2. When that mutation was replicated in mice and fruit-flies, those animals stayed awake for longer relative to compatriots with unchanged genes. Those extra couple of hours of wakefulness could be the slim difference between normalcy and greatness, according to one British article, which speculates that luminaries like Napoleon Bonaparte and Winston Churchill may have sported such a genetic advantage. Never has being called a “mutant” been such a compliment.

Psychoanalyzing the World with the Web

With the vast amount of data being thrown around the globe through the Internet every second of every day, it was only a matter of time before tech-savvy scientists began finding ways to harness that information for their own research. Last year, Google Flu Trends launched as a unique way of monitoring public health, pinpointing potential outbreaks based on surges in people searching for flu-like symptoms (never mind that it didn’t work so well during the spring H1N1 outbreak). Now, a team from the University of Vermont is looking to take the temperature of the nation’s mood by monitoring song lyrics, blogs and Twitter messages. The good news is that blogger happiness has increased since 2005, according to one graphic from the researchers’ upcoming paper in, yes, The Journal of Happiness Studies. That measuring method, which they’re calling a hedonimeter, will be publicly available soon at their website.

(now seems a good time to plug that the ScienceLife Twitter account has gone live; follow @ScienceLife)

Finally…

Math vs. Zombies, how oxytocin might improve your social life, and why Les Paul was probably the greatest musician-scientist of the 20th century.

The death of Michael Jackson has made its expected transition from a celebration of his life and music to an uncomfortable public autopsy of how he died. More than a month after his death, the official coroner’s autopsy has yet to be officially released, but various media outlets have sniffed out one particular drug that is expected to appear in the pop star’s toxicology report: the general anesthetic propofol.

The widely-used but little-discussed drug has provoked a number of “what is Propofol?” news segments, including a piece by ABC’s Primetime: Crime that brought a camera crew to the University of Chicago Medical Center earlier this week. That segment, reported by former MTV newsman Chris Connelly aired Wednesday night, and you can watch it here.

For 30 seconds (from -2:17 to -1:47) of the video, you’ll hear briefly about research by Avery Tung, associate professor of anesthesia and critical care for the Medical Center (you will also see a rat being anesthetized with a completely different drug, halothane). In the early part of the decade, Tung conducted an NIH-funded research project examining relationships between sleep and anesthesia, and published several papers and scientific abstracts looking at how propofol mimicked the effects of actual sleep. After Tung sat down with ABC, I spent a little more time with him discussing the anesthetic and his research.

Q: First of all, what is propofol, and how often is it used?

Tung: Propofol is given intravenously to induce anesthesia in surgical patients and to provide sedation for patients in the Intensive Care Unit. It’s the most common induction agent of anesthesia in current use. It pretty much has replaced pentothal because it has fewer side effects and it makes people feel better when they wake up.

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