hello tweets,

now birds are helping scientists figure out stuttering in humans!
read on ...

regards,

Devorah A. N. Bennu, PhD
email:nyneve at amnh.org or nyneve at myUW.net
work page http://research.amnh.org/ornithology/personnel/bennu.htm
personal pages http://research.amnh.org/users/nyneve/

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UPI Science News -- SEATTLE, Oct. 11 (UPI) The colorful zebra finch,
a common pet bird, could hold the clue for treatment of the estimated
2 million Americans who stutter.

Researchers Monday said they have found that about 7 percent of the
finches stutter they produce repetitive notes before they can
complete their song.

''The zebra finch is the first animal model for stuttering,'' said
Dr. David Rosenfield, professor of neurology and director of the
Stuttering Center at Baylor College of Medicine/The Methodist Hospital,
Houston.

Rosenfield said the discovery of the stuttering birds gives scientists
a tool that may determine the cause of stuttering as well as possibly
ways to correct the often embarrassing speech problem.

At the annual meeting of the American Neurological Association in
Seattle, Rosenfield said the finches natives of Australia learn a
distinctive song within the first 65 days of life and immediately
begin practicing their one tune.

''Zebra finches are 'closed learners,' meaning they learn one song
and that's it. And they must learn the song in order to mate,''
Rosenfield said.

When Rosenfield and his Baylor colleagues, speech scientist Nagalapura
Viswanath, and neurophysiologist Dr. Santosh Helekar, began following
the speech patterns of the finches and recording the birds' songs on
spectograms and oscillograms they discovered that a number of the birds
had mistakes in their songs. But most strikingly among 76 finches
studied they found five birds that stuttered.

''Because we can determine which birds stutter, we may be able to
learn how to change an abnormal bird song into a normal song and
how to change a normal song into an abnormal stutter,'' he said,
and then translate that knowledge into treatment for humans.

He said that reasons for why people stutter are still a mystery,
but the affliction strikes about 4 percent of children and carries
into adulthood for about one in every 100 people.

Rosenfield said the finch is a good model for stuttering because
both birds and humans tend to learn language similarly.

The studies with the zebra finches, Rosenfield said, will not only
allow scientists to test different pharmaceutical treatments for
stuttering, but the research could also lead to better understanding
of how birds learn and of how cells learn to turn on an off.

''It takes a leap of faith,'' he said, ''but studies of how birds
sing could lead to treatment of such diseases as Parkinson's disease,
Alzheimer's disease and breast cancer.''

A protein, synuclein, is produced in greater amounts when a bird
sings, and that same substance is found in the diseased cells,
Rosenfield said.

''We think the finch is a pretty good model for stuttering,'' he
said. He said researchers are now preparing experiments to try and
stop the stuttering birds from repeating sounds, the first steps
before human testing can begin.

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