Feature Channels: Neuro

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The cerebral cortex resembles a vast switchboard. Countless lines carrying information about the environment, for example from the sensory organs, converge in the cerebral cortex. In order to direct the flow of data into meaningful pathways, the individual pyramidal cells of the cerebral cortex act like miniature switchboard operators. Each cell receives information from several thousand lines. If the signals make sense, the line is opened, and the information is relayed onward. Scientists at the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology in Martinsried have now shown for the first time that contact points between specific neuron types are clustered in groups on the target neuron. It is probable that signals are coordinated with each other in this way to make them more "convincing".

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A detailed new map by researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis lays out the landscape of the human cerebral cortex. The map will accelerate progress in the study of brain diseases, as well as help to elucidate what makes us unique as a species.

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Jersey Shore is the only Comprehensive Stroke Center in Monmouth and Ocean Counties and is the leading regional provider for advanced stroke care

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Researchers at the University of Cincinnati (UC) are studying how cognitive therapy that uses mindfulness techniques, such as meditation, quiet reflection and facilitator-led discussion, may serve as an adjunct to pharmacological treatments for youth with anxiety disorders.

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The Food and Drug Administration has approved the first focused ultrasound device to treat essential tremor, the most common movement disorder, in patients who do not respond to medication. The scalpel-free approach has been pioneered by Jeff Elias, MD, at the University of Virginia School of Medicine, who led an international clinical trial that demonstrated the safety and effectiveness of the device.

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Two new grants from the New York State Department of Health (NYSDOH) will enable New Yorkers with Alzheimer’s disease and dementia, and their families, to get the most comprehensive care and support services available in the New York City area. NYU Langone Medical Center is launching its Alzheimer’s and Related Dementias Family Support Program and is establishing a Center of Excellence for Alzheimer’s Disease.

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In research using patient medical records, investigators from Johns Hopkins and Sheppard Pratt Health System report that people with serious mental disorders who were hospitalized for mania were more likely to be on antibiotics to treat active infections than a group of people without a mental disorder.

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People who selectively recalled positive information over neutral and negative information performed worse on memory tests conducted by University of California, Irvine neurobiologists, who said the results suggest that this discriminating remembrance may be a marker for early stages of memory loss in the elderly.

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Using a robust model for Parkinson’s disease, University of Alabama at Birmingham researchers and colleagues have discovered an interaction in neurons that contributes to Parkinson’s disease, and they have shown that drugs now under development may block the process.

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New findings published today by a team of researchers led by Dr. Andres Lozano at the Krembil Neuroscience Centre (KNC) of Toronto Western Hospital (TWH) have provided further insight into the effects of Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) in the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease.

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Available research suggests that noninvasive stimulation of a specific brain area can reduce food cravings—particularly for high-calorie, "appetitive" foods, according to a review in the Psychosomatic Medicine: Journal of Biobehavioral Medicine, the official journal of the American Psychosomatic Society. The journal is published by Wolters Kluwer.

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Abnormalities in brain regions involved in forming insight may help explain why some people with anorexia nervosa have trouble recognizing their dangerous, dysfunctional eating habits.

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Cedars-Sinai scientists are seeking to build an improved stem-cell model of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) to accelerate progress toward a cure for the devastating neurological disorder. Their findings demonstrate that current models can be enhanced by the aging of motor neurons to show how ALS damages cells later in life.

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Mapping damage to the brain’s white matter connections after stroke can predict long-term language deficits, improve the understanding of how language is processed in the brain and potentially inform a course of rehabilitative therapy that would be more effective.

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St. Joseph's Hospital - A new study from Lawson Health Research Institute and the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences (ICES) has cast doubt on the clinical significance of brain deposits of gadolinium (a chemical contrast agent commonly used to enhance MRI imaging).

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Contrary to popular belief, taking estrogen after menopause may not affect the memory and thinking abilities of healthy women no matter when the treatment is started. The research is published in the July 20, 2016, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.

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The confidence in our decision-making serves to both gauge errors and to revise our approach, New York University neuroscientists have found. Their study offers insights into the hierarchical nature of how we make choices over extended periods of time, ranging from medical diagnoses and treatment to the strategies we use to invest our money.

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A toxic Alzheimer’s protein can spread through the brain via the extracellular space that surrounds the brain’s neurons, finds a study from Columbia University Medical Center.

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Penn Medicine has established the Penn Neurodegeneration Genomics Center (PNGC) as a national focal point for Alzheimer’s disease (AD) genetics research. The Center, an interdisciplinary program that brings together faculty members in neurodegenerative disorders, human genetics, genomics, bioinformatics, and biostatistics.

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A new study hopes to develop a faster, more precise and more efficient real-time method for fMRI measurements in patients with Alzheimer’s disease.

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A new study on infantile memory formation in rats points to the importance of critical periods in early-life learning on functional development of the brain. The research, conducted by scientists at New York University’s Center for Neural Science, reveals the significance of learning experiences over the first two to four years of human life.

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Could immune system problems contribute to an inability to have normal social interactions? The answer appears to be yes, and that finding could have great implications for neurological conditions such as autism-spectrum disorders and schizophrenia.

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Meditation has long been promoted as a way to feel more at peace. But research from a Texas Tech University faculty member shows it can significantly improve attention, working memory, creativity, immune function, emotional regulation, self-control, cognitive and school performance and healthy habits while reducing stress.

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Researchers at the Allen Institute for Brain Science have published an in-depth analysis of a comprehensive molecular atlas of brain development in the non-human primate. This analysis uncovers features of the genetic code underlying brain development in our close evolutionary relative, while revealing distinct features of human brain development by comparison. The study is based on the NIH Blueprint Non-Human Primate (NHP) Atlas, a publicly available resource created by the Allen Institute and colleagues at the University of California, Davis and the California National Primate Research Center. This resource enables researchers to understand the underpinnings of both healthy brain development and many neuropsychiatric diseases. Analysis of the atlas is featured this week in the journal Nature.

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Working memory can be thought of as short-term memory, temporarily holding ideas and recent events in the mind for quick recall. Working memory often declines with age; it may also be susceptible to interactions between age and alcohol use. Frontal theta power (FTP) and posterior alpha power (PAP) are electrophysiological measures of brain activity associated with cognitive effort and maintenance of visual information. This study looks at alcohol effects on FTP and PAP during a working memory task in younger and older social drinkers.

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Japanese researchers centered at Nagoya University reveal a role for orexin neurons of the hypothalamus when mice respond to painful stimuli, and suggest a link between stimulus response and consciousness.

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Biologists develop a new method for analyzing brain images and demonstrate it with a study on fruit flies.

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Every time you move around, you are turning on genes in your brain. A study in mice at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis shows that if such genes get stuck in the “on” position, the consequences can include faulty brain wiring that affects learning and memory.

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Researchers elucidate the function of sparse population of inhibitory neurons in memory encoding

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We can thank neurons in the brain’s cerebral cortex for the rich representation of the world we “see.” In response to sensory stimuli—sights, sounds, tastes, smells, touch—neurons fire electrical spikes that collectively make up our brain’s model of the world. Get more HMS news here To help construct that world, individual neurons are so specialized that they fire in response to specific external inputs.

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While measuring brain activity with magnetic resonance imaging during blood pressure trials, UCLA researchers found that men and women had opposite responses in the right front of the insular cortex, a part of the brain integral to the experience of emotions, blood pressure control, and self-awareness.

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A gene associated with Alzheimer’s disease and recovery after brain injury may show its effects on the brain and thinking skills as early as childhood, according to a study published in the July 13, 2016, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.

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Neuroscientists at the University of Chicago studying a unique gene that expresses two proteins, one that is necessary for life and another, that when mutated causes a neurodegenerative disease called spinocerbellar ataxia type 6 (SCA6), have developed a technique to selectively block the disease-causing protein without affecting the other.

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A researcher at Arizona State University has discovered how to control multiple robotic drones using the human brain.

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The majority of cases of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are unknown. In a paper published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry, researchers at the University of California San Diego School of Medicine, with colleagues across the nation and world, have created a “mini-brain” model, derived from persons with a particular form of idiopathic ASD characterized by over-sized brains, revealing a defective molecular pathway during brain development that results in early neuronal overgrowth and dysfunctional cortical networks.

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Johns Hopkins University researchers are the first to glimpse the human brain making a purely voluntary decision to act.

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Noa Ofen, Ph.D., a Wayne State University researcher in lifespan cognitive neuroscience, received a five-year, $1.9 million grant from the National Institute of Mental Health of the National Institutes of Health to study the development of memory networks in children. Researchers will investigate brain activity predictive of memory formation in children who undergo surgery as part of clinical management of medically uncontrolled epilepsy.

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Researchers from the University of Sydney's Boden Institute of Obesity, Nutrition, Exercise & Eating Disorders have developed a portable and easy-to-use method to help people estimate portion size using only their hands.

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A connection between the bacteria living in the gut and immunological disorders such as multiple sclerosis have long been suspected, but for the first time, researchers have detected clear evidence of changes that tie the two together. Investigators from Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) have found that people with multiple sclerosis have different patterns of gut microorganisms than those of their healthy counterparts. In addition, patients receiving treatment for MS have different patterns than untreated patients. The new research supports recent studies linking immunological disorders to the gut microbiome and may have implications for pursuing new therapies for MS.

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No single assessment tool is able to consistently determine driving ability in people with Alzheimer's disease and mild cognitive impairment, a St. Michael's Hospital research review has found.

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Chad Carr's memory lives on at Mott through research funded by a stream of donations to the ChadTough Fund at the University of Michigan and a recent research grant in Chad’s name from The V Foundation for Cancer Research.

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Researchers examined the case files of all patients younger than 5 years of age who had been admitted to Le Bonheur Children’s Hospital between 2009 and 2014 for abusive head injury. The authors’ goal was to identify patient demographics and determine the incidence and extent of the injuries, seasonal trends associated with this abuse, required neurosurgical procedures, and costs of hospitalization. The number of cases is on the rise,

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The authors recount how Dr. Robert Hubbard, a biomechanical crash engineer, and his brother-in-law, Jim Downing, a racecar driver, joined forces to create the HANS® device, which was designed to prevent the occurrence of shear injuries between the head and neck during high-impact crashes.

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A small phase I study provides molecular evidence that an FDA-approved drug for leukemia significantly increased brain dopamine and reduced toxic proteins linked to disease progression in patients with Parkinson’s disease or dementia with Lewy bodies.

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Two Northwestern University neuroscientists have identified the neurochemical signal likely missing in Parkinson’s disease by being the first to discover two distinctly different kinds of neurons that deliver dopamine to an important brain region responsible for both movement and learning/reward behavior. The findings provide a new framework for understanding the role of the dopamine system in movement control and learning/reward and how dysfunction of the dopamine system can result in a range of neurological disorders.

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Understanding the networks of connections between brain regions and how they are changed by a stroke is crucial to understanding how stroke patients heal, according to new research from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

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Whether at school, in car accidents, on the sports field or the battlefield, mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) is a common part of our lives. It is especially frequent among children, athletes, and the elderly. Now, scientists at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem have shown that a single dose of a new molecule they developed can effectively protect the brain from inflammation, cell death, and cognitive impairments that often follow a mild traumatic brain injury.

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Neurodegenerative disease researchers in the U.K. fear the Brexit will curtail their access to EU funds and complicate international collaborations. Analysts agree that a U.K. exit is likely to harm big science across the continent.

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A metallic molecule being studied at Rice University begins to glow when bound to amyloid protein fibrils of the sort implicated in Alzheimer's disease. When triggered with ultraviolet light, the molecule glows much brighter, which enables real-time monitoring of amyloid fibrils as they aggregate in lab experiments.

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Traumatic brain injury (TBI) with a loss of consciousness (LOC) may be associated with later development of Parkinson’s disease but not Alzheimer’s disease or incident dementia.