Remember the telephone game where people take turns whispering a message into the ear of the next person in line? By the time the last person speaks it out loud, the message has radically changed. It’s been altered with each retelling.

Turns out your memory is a lot like the telephone game, according to a new Northwestern Medicine study.   Every time you remember an event from the past, your brain networks change in ways that can alter the later recall of the event. Thus, the next time you remember it, you might recall not the original event, but what you remembered the previous time. The Northwestern study is the first to show this.

“A memory is not simply an image produced by time traveling back to the original event -- it can be an image that is somewhat distorted because of the prior times you remembered it,” said Donna Bridge, a postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and lead author of the paper on the study recently published in the Journal of Neuroscience. “Your memory of an event can grow less precise even to the point of being totally false with each retrieval.”

The findings have implications for witnesses giving testimony in criminal trials, Bridge noted.  “Maybe a witness remembers something fairly accurately the first time because his memories aren’t that distorted,” she said. “After that it keeps going downhill.”

The published study reports on Bridge’s work with 12 participants, but she has run several variations of the study with a total of 70 people.

“Every single person has shown this effect,” she said. “It’s really huge," said Bridge.   The reason for the distortion, Bridge said, is the fact that human memories are always adapting.

“Memories aren’t static,” she noted. “If you remember something in the context of a new environment and time, or if you are even in a different mood, your memories might integrate the new information.”

For the study, people were asked to recall the location of objects on a grid in three sessions over three consecutive days.  “Our findings show that incorrect recollection of the object’s location on day two influenced how people remembered the object’s location on day three,” Bridge explained. “Retrieving the memory didn’t simply reinforce the original association. Rather, it altered memory storage to reinforce the location that was recalled at session two.”

“This study shows how memories normally change over time, sometimes becoming distorted,” Bridge noted. “When you think back to an event that happened to you long ago -- say your first day at school -- you actually may be recalling information you retrieved about that event at some later time, not the original event.”

Author:   Marla Paul, Northwestern NewsCenter

Men may not have ovaries, but that doesn’t mean they can’t develop some of the features of polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS). That’s one of the reasons Andrea Dunaif, MD, Charles F. Kettering Professor of Endocrinology and Metabolism, would like to change the way scientists think about the complex genetic disease.

“It should really be seen as a metabolic disorder affecting men as well as women across the lifespan, rather than a female reproductive disorder with metabolic features,” Dunaif said.The current definition of the disorder is rooted in history. PCOS was first identified in 1935 as a gynecologic condition known as Stein-Leventhal syndrome, named after the physicians who described it. Since then, the understanding of PCOS has evolved. Symptoms in women often first become apparent in adolescence and may include irregular periods and excess hair on the face, chest, or back – all caused by high levels of male hormones. The syndrome is seen as a major health concern because it is frequently associated with obesity and substantially increases risk for type-2 diabetes and, perhaps, heart disease. It is also among the most common disorders of reproductive-age women, affecting up to 10 percent of the population worldwide.

PCOS runs in families, indicating that there is likely a genetic susceptibility to the disorder. This observation first raised the question as to whether men in PCOS families might also be affected. Dunaif’s research group has been able to show that brothers and fathers of women with PCOS also have elevated male hormone levels and face the same long-term health risks, such as diabetes, obesity, and heart disease. 

“Because this is a genetic condition, our research studying families has provided a powerful resource for finding causal genes,” said Dunaif. “We are very fortunate to have recruited more than 500 families over the years. Many of these families are ideal for the application of the newest technologies for identifying disease genes, such as whole genome sequencing, because we have DNA available from affected and unaffected sisters, as well as both parents.”

Thus far, the research points to the likelihood that the same gene defect is responsible for both the reproductive and the metabolic abnormalities. Sponsored by several National Institutes of Health grants, Dunaif and her co-investigators, Margrit Urbanek, PhD, associate professor of medicine-endocrinology, and M. Geoffrey Hayes, PhD, assistant professor of medicine, are leading an international collaboration to map genes for PCOS.

“Ultimately, we hope that we can find what causes the condition so we can develop drugs to reverse or prevent PCOS,” Dunaif said.

Dunaif is also co-chair of the steering committee for the first NIH-sponsored evidenced-based methodology workshop on PCOS, which will be held in December on the NIH campus. An independent panel with broadly-based expertise will develop a scientific statement based on the information presented at this conference. The consensus statement will advance both clinical care and future research in the field. In addition, Dunaif hopes that this statement will highlight the major health implications of PCOS so that the condition is recognized as an important medical disorder.

“PCOS is a major women’s health problem, and the fact that it is genetic means that the male relatives of affected women are at increased risk for the adverse metabolic outcomes associated with PCOS,” she said.

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act has cleared two major hurdles in the recent past: the Supreme Court ruling on constitutionality and the reelection of President Obama. However, there is a very good chance that the Supreme Court has not seen the last of the health care reform law. Despite the bill's legal successes in the past, there are (at publication) more than 35 different cases on file against the contraception mandate in the bill filed by individual companies and religious organizations.

Thanks to the health care law, insurance plans are required to cover birth control and other women's preventive health services with no co-payments or deductibles at the start of their next plan year. For proponents of the bill, this means more health plans come under the law's reach, and that more women will be able to keep their wallets closed when they pick up their birth control.

Proponents further assert that gender equality means women having complete control over their reproductive lives. However, some organizations do not believe funding such services align with their organizational missions. Most filing amicus briefs are using the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and it’s unanimous support by the Supreme Court, to say that the mandate violates religious organizations right to not pay for contraception.

The Religious Freedom Restoration Act requires that the federal “government may substantially burden a person’s exercise of religion only if it demonstrates that application of the burden to the person 1. Is in furtherance of a compelling governmental interest and 2. Is the least restrictive means of furthering that compelling governmental interest.”

Those in support of the mandate, like the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), believe that the mandate will be upheld. The ACLU specifically states in their amicus brief that the plaintiffs are trying to “discriminate against women and deny them benefits because of [the employer’s] religious beliefs.”

No matter where a woman falls in her beliefs about what the health reform bill should and should not require, it is clear that the Affordable Care Act still has many hurdles before full implementation. For more information about the impact of these state-level decisions on your contraception and access to reproductive health care, contact your local Congressional leaders and employer mission statements.

Heavy drinking during pregnancy disrupts proper brain development in children and adolescents years after they were exposed to alcohol in the womb, according to a study supported by the National Institutes of Health. The study is the first to track children over several years to examine how heavy exposure to alcohol in utero affects brain growth over time.

Using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans, researchers found that brain growth patterns in children whose mothers drank heavily while pregnant differed from normal patterns of development seen in children who were not exposed to alcohol before birth.

The findings suggest that children with heavy alcohol exposure have decreased brain plasticity – the brain's ability to grow and remodel itself based on experience with the outside world. Such adaptation continues throughout one’s life and is crucial to learning new skills and adapting to the environment.

"This study documents the long-term impact of heavy prenatal alcohol exposure on brain development," said Ken R. Warren, Ph.D., acting director of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), which provided most of the funding for the study.

"It underscores that heavy drinking during pregnancy often has lasting consequences for the child’s growth and development, and reminds us that women who are, who may be, or who are trying to become pregnant, should not drink alcohol."

The study currently appears online in the Oct. 31, 2012 issue of The Journal of Neuroscience.

During normal development, brain volume increases rapidly at a young age as new neural connections are formed, and then decreases in certain regions during adolescence as underused brain connections are cleared away to increase efficiency. While unexposed children showed this pattern of robust growth and reduction in the brain’s outmost layer, known as the cerebral cortex, those heavily exposed to alcohol typically only lost cortical volume.

In addition, heavier alcohol exposure was linked to lower intelligence, greater facial abnormalities, and little change in brain volume between scans.

The study findings may have implications for developing early treatments that could correct or improve these patterns of abnormal brain development.   The study authors write that this work may also help to understand and treat other disorders with abnormal brain growth in childhood and adolescence, such as autism.

This study was performed in conjunction with the Collaborative Initiative on Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders, a consortium of FASD researchers supported by NIAAA. (More information at: www.cifasd.org)