Several studies have demonstrated that the primary active constituent of cannabis, delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (∆9-THC), induces transient psychosis-like effects in healthy subjects similar to those observed in schizophrenia. However, the mechanisms underlying these effects are not clear.
In the first study of its kind, researchers have shown that inadequate maternal iron intake during pregnancy exerts subtle effects on infant brain development. Their findings have been published online by the journal Pediatric Research.
Parkinson’s disease isn’t the kind of affliction that will kill most people. Instead, it creeps up slowly and progressively destroys the quality of life of those who develop it.
Scientists at Seattle Children’s Research Institute have found a way to rapidly suppress epilepsy in mouse models by manipulating a known genetic pathway using a cancer drug currently in human clinical trials for the treatment of brain and breast cancer.
How fast elderly people walk may be related to the amount of amyloid they have built up in their brains, even if they don’t yet have symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease, according to a study published in the December 2, 2015, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.
A new drug developed by scientists at Saint Louis University increases the expression of key genes linked to autism.
Researchers help the brain make GM1 ganglioside, a protective substance that is diminished in the brains of Parkinson's patients
New research from the University of Alberta’s Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry is trailblazing a potential new pathway for the treatment of multiple sclerosis (MS). The research, published in the Journal of Neuroinflammation, examines a novel therapeutic strategy to reduce inflammation in the brain.
Scientists have recently found evidence that professional football players are susceptible to a progressive degenerative disease, chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), which is caused by repetitive brain trauma. Now, researchers on Mayo Clinic’s Florida campus have discovered a significant and surprising amount of CTE in males who had participated in amateur contact sports in their youth.
Most children and adolescents with herniated disks in the lower (lumbar) spine have some sort of malformation of the spinal vertebrae, reports a study in the December issue of Neurosurgery, official journal of the Congress of Neurological Surgeons, published by Wolters Kluwer.
Biomedical Engineering Professor Elizabeth Hillman has won an NIH BRAIN Initiative grant, the first awarded to Columbia Engineering, for her work on SCAPE, a high-speed 3D microscope she has developed for imaging the living brain. Whereas most modern microscopes can only image a single plane at up to 20 frames per second, Hillman’s technique can over 100 planes within a 3D volume in the same amount of time, enabling scientists to make exciting new discoveries.
In addition to treating depression, a commonly used antidepressant medication also protects against compounds that can cause memory loss and dementia, a Loyola University Medical Center study has found.
You may believe that you have forgotten the Chinese you spoke as a child, but your brain hasn’t. Moreover, that “forgotten” first language may well influence what goes on in your brain when you speak English or French today. In a paper published today in Nature Communications, researchers from McGill University and the Montreal Neurological Institute describe their discovery that even brief, early exposure to a language influences how the brain processes sounds from a second language later in life. Even when the first language learned is no longer spoken.
According to a study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, brains can't really fit into the categories of "male" or "female" -- their distinguishing features actually vary across a spectrum. Researchers led by University of Tel-Aviv studied brain scans of some 1,400 individuals and could not find a single pattern that distinguishes between a male brain and a female brain.
While stress, travel, and changes of schedule are not likely to trigger a relapse, they can make multiple sclerosis symptoms worse and that can put a damper on holiday festivities. Professor of neurology at Saint Louis University Florian Thomas, M.D., offers strategies to keep MS symptoms in check.
Menkes disease arises from dysfunction in ATP7A, a protein that transports copper to cells, leading to brain development complications. Introducing working versions of ATP7A in the brain is considered the most direct therapeutic approach. However, a new study suggests that functioning ATP7A located elsewhere in the body, not necessarily the entire brain, can help treat the disorder.
A University of California, Irvine research team is part of a $37 million national effort to identify biomarkers that will predict the onset of Alzheimer’s disease in people with Down syndrome. UCI pediatric neurologist Dr. Ira Lott and colleagues will receive $4.7 million of that funding from the National Institute on Aging to support his continuing work to uncover the mystery of progressive cognitive impairment seen in some people over 40 with Down syndrome.
Latest Research Highlights from ACSM— November 2015
Johns Hopkins researchers have developed a method to efficiently turn human stem cells into retinal ganglion cells, the type of nerve cells located within the retina that transmit visual signals from the eye to the brain.
Many human gene variants have evolved specifically to protect older adults against neurodegenerative and cardiovascular diseases, thus preserving their contributions to society, report University of California, San Diego School of Medicine researchers in the November 30 issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Minutes count when treating stroke, but current diagnostics take as long as three hours, careful lab work and skilled technicians to arrive at a conclusive diagnosis. Scientists at Cornell University’s Baker Institute for Animal Health have developed a device that helps diagnose stroke in less than 10 minutes using a drop of blood barely big enough to moisten your fingertip.
Taking the pregnancy hormone estriol along with their conventional medications helped patients with relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis (RRMS) avoid relapses, according to results of a Phase II randomized, placebo-controlled study led by UCLA researchers.
Pre-existing asthma may be a strong predictor of future chronic migraine attacks in individuals experiencing occasional migraine headaches, according to researchers from the University of Cincinnati (UC), Montefiore Headache Center and Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and Vedanta Research.
Detroit Medical Center Children’s Hospital of Michigan Pediatric Neurosurgeon Sandeep Sood, M.D., developed minimally-invasive endoscopic surgery, demonstrated efficacy in treating intractable epileptic seizures in children.
The mosquito-borne virus chikungunya may lead to severe brain infection and even death in infants and people over 65, according to a new study that reviewed a chikungunya outbreak on Reunion Island off the coast of Madagascar in 2005-2006. The study is published in the November 25, 2015, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. Many cases have occurred in the United States in people who acquired the virus while traveling, but the first locally transmitted case in the U.S. occurred in Florida in July.
Scientists at the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP) show for the first time a direct link between neural activity across an animal‘s entire brain and behavior.
Schizophrenia is notoriously difficult to diagnose and treat, in large part because it manifests differently in different people. A new study helps explain why. Researchers at UNC have created a map that shows how specific schizophrenia symptoms are linked to distinct brain circuits.
Researcher Christian Duval, PhD, and his team have developed a new, simple and non-invasive approach to create a biomechanical and cognitive profile of football players and more quickly and accurately detect concussions in these individuals.
People with bipolar disorder have lower levels of certain omega-3 fatty acids that cross the blood-brain barrier compared to those who do not, according to researchers from Penn State College of Medicine and the National Institutes of Health.
Amyloid beta, the plaque that accumulates in the brains of people with Alzheimer’s disease, may also contribute to Alzheimer’s by interfering with normal blood flow in the brain, according to investigators UAB. In findings published Nov. 23 in the journal Brain, the team shows that when amyloid beta accumulates around blood vessels — where it is known as vascular amyloid — it appears to prevent the brain from properly regulating blood flow, which is essential to normal brain function.
Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute scientists have uncovered a mechanism in the brain that could account for some of the neural degeneration and memory loss in people with Alzheimer’s disease. The researchers, together with scientists at the University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Medicine, discovered that a common symptom of Alzheimer’s disease – the accumulation of amyloid plaques along blood vessels – could be disrupting blood flow in the brain.
In the fleeting moments after a liquid is subjected to a sudden change in pressure, microscopic bubbles rapidly form and collapse in a process known as cavitation. In the human brain, this is believed to be a mechanistic cause of traumatic brain injury, or TBI, but the phenomenon has yet to be directly observed in brain tissue because the bubbles appear and disappear within microseconds. To address this, researchers are seeking to understand how cavitation might injure neurons by using a 3-D imaging system coupled with a diffraction grating to examine their post-exposure morphology. They will present their recent findings APS’s DFD 2015 Meeting.
Six University of California, San Diego professors have been named Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the world’s largest general scientific society. They are among 347 members selected this year by colleagues in their disciplines to be honored for “scientifically or socially distinguished efforts to advance science or its applications.”
The readings were collected during brain surgery as the conscious patients played an investment game, demonstrating rapid dopamine release encodes crucial information. The findings have implications for Parkinson’s disease and disorders such as depression and addiction.
Scientists at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine have demonstrated in lab animals that a family of therapeutic stem cells lessen consequences of a damaging immune response and preserve function that would otherwise be lost. Their findings appear in the Nov. 19 Scientific Reports.
As we age or develop neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's, our brain cells may not produce sufficient energy to remain fully functional. Researchers discovered that an enzyme called SIRT3 that is located in mitochondria — the cell's powerhouse — may protect mice brains against the kinds of stresses believed to contribute to energy loss. Furthermore, mice that ran on a wheel increased their levels of this protective enzyme.
In a new study that could have implications for future drug discovery efforts for a number of neurodegenerative diseases, scientists from the Florida campus of The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have found that the interaction between a pair of brain proteins has a substantial and previously unrecognized effect on memory formation.
A new study by Dr. Naama Mayseless and Prof. Simone Shamay-Tsoory from the Department of Psychology at the University of Haifa attempted to crack the connection between brain activity and creativity. The results shed a new, perhaps unexpected light, on our ability to think outside the box
University of Georgia researchers have developed a simple technique to measure an individual’s visual processing speed—the speed at which an individual can comprehend visual information—in order to identify whether or not they may have cognitive issues.
Neuromyelitis optica spectrum disorder, a disease often confused for multiple sclerosis, may increase a woman’s risk for miscarriage and preeclampsia during pregnancy, according to a study published in the November 18, 2015, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.
University of Louisville researcher Bart Borghuis, Ph.D., has increased our understanding of how people and animals deal with sensorimotor delay in day-to-day interactions by analyzing the hunting skills of salamanders. His article, “The Role of Motion Extrapolation in Amphibian Prey Capture,” is published in today’s issue of The Journal of Neuroscience.
Most people probably think that we perceive the five basic tastes—sweet, sour, salty, bitter and umami (savory)—with our tongue, which then sends signals to our brain “telling” us what we’ve tasted. However, scientists have turned this idea on its head, demonstrating in mice the ability to change the way something tastes by manipulating groups of cells in the brain.
Neuroscientists, food scientists and internationally-renowned chefs convened at the University of Kentucky recently to explore ways to help patients with neurologically-related taste impairments enjoy food again.
Men are twice as likely as women to develop Parkinson’s disease. New research suggests that testosterone enhances the susceptibility of brain cells that control movement to damage from chemical imbalances, explaining the sex differences in the occurrence of Parkinson’s.
A new study done by University of Texas at Dallas researchers indicates that watching 3-D images of tongue movements can help individuals learn speech sounds. Researchers say the findings could be especially helpful for stroke patients seeking to improve their speech articulation.
In a novel animal study design that mimicked human clinical trials, researchers at University of California, San Diego School of Medicine report that long-term treatment using a small molecule drug that reduces activity of the brain’s stress circuitry significantly reduces Alzheimer’s disease (AD) neuropathology and prevents onset of cognitive impairment in a mouse model of the neurodegenerative condition. The findings are described in the current online issue of the journal Alzheimer’s & Dementia: The Journal of the Alzheimer’s Association.
Van Andel Research Institute (VARI) is continuing the expansion of its neurodegenerative disease research program, which aims to answer fundamental questions about diseases such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s, with the addition of two outstanding scientists.
Scientists have identified two chemical scents in the urine of female mice that arouse sexual behavior in males, a discovery that shines a spotlight on how mouse pheromones control behavior. The research, at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, is available online in the journal Cell.
RPB-supported researchers have made a significant discovery that might lead to the delay or prevention of the most common cause of blindness in the elderly: age-related macular degeneration (AMD). Patients who take the drug L-DOPA (for Parkinson Disease, Restless Legs or other movement disorders) are significantly less likely to develop AMD and, if they do, it is at a significantly later age.
Researchers have developed a brain imaging technique for patients whose epilepsy does not respond to drug treatment and are not candidates for seizure-relieving surgeries. The imaging technique, known as glutamate chemical exchange saturation transfer (GluCEST), images changes in glutamate levels in brain structures that identify the location of seizures not detected with conventional MRI.
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