Feature Channels: Neuro

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Neuroscientists at Duke Health have developed a brain-machine interface (BMI) that allows primates to use only their thoughts to navigate a robotic wheelchair.

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Children who are emotionally abused may be more likely to experience migraines as young adults, according to a preliminary study released today that will be presented at the American Academy of Neurology’s 68th Annual Meeting in Vancouver, Canada, April 15 to 21, 2016. The link between migraine and abuse was stronger for emotional abuse than for physical or sexual abuse in the study.

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New research led by scientists at UC Berkeley shows for the first time that PET scans can track the progressive stages of Alzheimer’s disease in cognitively normal adults, a key advance in the early diagnosis and staging of the neurodegenerative disorder.

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New research sheds light on how the rhythms of daily life are encoded in the brain. Scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have discovered that different groups of neurons, those charged with keeping time, become active at different times of day despite being on the same molecular clock.

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UT Southwestern Medical Center has joined a consortium of seven leading universities to develop new technologies to improve memory in people with traumatic brain injury, mild cognitive impairment, epilepsy, and Alzheimer’s disease.

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A new discovery about ischemic stroke may allow to doctors to predict a patient’s risk of having a second stroke using a commonly performed blood test and their genetic profile.

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Sustained stress erodes memory, and the immune system plays a key role in the cognitive impairment, according to a new study from researchers at The Ohio State University.

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If your neighborhood is well-lit at night, you may not be sleeping well, according to a study released today that will be presented at the American Academy of Neurology’s 68th Annual Meeting in Vancouver, Canada, April 15 to 21, 2016.

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A tiny protein known as an “amyloid beta” acts like Jekyll and Hyde in mysterious ways within the human body. Outsized human suffering is linked to this otherwise tiny, innocuous-looking molecule, as it is suspected to be a key player in the neurodegenerative mechanisms underlying Alzheimer’s disease. Amyloid beta molecules appear to become toxic within our bodies when they make contact with each other and form small bundles. Oddly, they may become less toxic again as the bundles grow larger in size and form ordered fibrillary plaque deposits. This begs the question: What’s different about these bundles than the single protein molecule and the fibrils?

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A neural tube defect, myelomeningocele affects many systems in the human body and requires multidisciplinary medical care to ensure optimal function and quality of life as well as survival of the patient. These patients’ medical needs are best served by high-volume medical centers, according to a new article in the Journal of Neurosurgery: Spine.

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The blueberry, already labeled a “super fruit” for its power to potentially lower the risk of heart disease and cancer, also could be another weapon in the war against Alzheimer’s disease. The researchers present their work today at the 251st National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society.

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Remember those colorful “grow capsules” that blossom into animal-shaped sponges in water? Using a similar idea, scientists have developed biodegradable polymer grafts that, when surgically placed in damaged vertebrae, should grow to be just the right size and shape to fix the spinal column. The researchers present their work at the 251st National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society.

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Turning the clock ahead or back one hour during daylight saving time transitions may be tied to an increased risk of ischemic stroke, but only temporarily, according to a preliminary study released today that will be presented at the American Academy of Neurology’s 68th Annual Meeting in Vancouver, Canada, April 15 to 21, 2016.

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Researchers seeking to better understand how our genes contribute to stroke risk have completed what is believed to be the largest and most comprehensive review of the human genome to identify genes that predispose people to ischemic stroke, the cause of approximately 85 percent of all strokes.

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The brain chemical dopamine regulates how mice learn to avoid a disagreeable encounter, Science has shown that dopamine reinforces ‘rewarding’ behaviors, but to the researchers’ surprise, they now show that situations that animals learn to avoid are also regulated by dopamine.

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Different groups of neurons program biological clocks to orchestrate our behaviors by sending messages in a unidirectional manner downstream, a team of biologists has found.

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A drug that would be the first to target the cause of Huntington’s disease (HD) is effective and safe when tested in mice and monkeys, according to data released today that will be presented at the American Academy of Neurology’s 68th Annual Meeting in Vancouver, Canada, April 15 to 21, 2016. A study to test the drug in humans has begun.

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Research led by investigators in veterinary and human medicine has identified genetic pathways that exacerbate severity of canine compulsive disorder in Doberman pinschers, a discovery that could lead to better therapies for obsessive compulsive disorder in people. The discovery appears online in advance of print on February 29 in the International Journal of Applied Research in Veterinary Medicine.

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Everyone has a different mixture of personality traits: some are outgoing, some are tough and some are anxious. A new study suggests that brains also have different traits that affect both anatomical and cognitive factors, such as intelligence and memory.

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Valerie T. Cotter, DrNP, Advanced Senior Lecturer and Director of the Adult-Gerontology Primary Care Nurse Practitioner Program University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing, has been appointed to the National Quality Forum’s (NQF) Neurology Standing Committee.

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Columbia University scientists have developed a new optical technique to study how information is transmitted in the brains of mice. Using this method, they found that only a small portion of synapses—the connections between cells that control brain activity—may be active at any given time.

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A new cooling technique can both protect the brain’s speech centers during surgery and pinpoint the areas separately responsible for word formation and speech timing.

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Research led by St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and the German Cancer Research Center shows molecular analysis is likely to improve classification and diagnosis of a rare brain tumor and advance precision medicine

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Niemann-Pick Type C (NPC) disease is a rare, fatal neurodegenerative disease for which there is currently no cure. NPC primarily strikes children before and during adolescence and affects one in every 150,000 children. Researchers at the University of Notre Dame used an existing FDA-approved drug in a novel approach to treatment of NPC with promising results.

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Most of the 82 Ebola survivors in a new study from the world’s largest Ebola outbreak had brain symptoms more than six months after the initial infection. The preliminary results will be presented at the American Academy of Neurology’s 68th Annual Meeting in Vancouver, Canada, April 15 to 21, 2016. The study is part of the larger Prevail III study, which follows patients with prior Ebola virus disease and their close contacts who serve as study controls.

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People who keep mentally and physically healthy in middle age may help stave off the symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease, but the activity does not affect the underlying disease changes in the brain for most people, according to a study published in the February 24 online edition of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.

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Keeping the mind active may delay symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease; however, the activity does not change the underlying disease in the brain for most people, according to a study published today in the online edition of Neurology.

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Using a laser probe, neurosurgeons have opened the brain’s protective cover, enabling them to deliver chemotherapy drugs to patients with a form of deadly brain cancer. The findings also suggest that other exciting approaches such as cancer immunotherapy also may be useful for patients with glioblastomas.

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Many patients showing signs of dementia are quickly diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease when they might actually suffer from frontotemporal dementia, delaying the appropriate treatment for them.

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Opportunities for young investigators to present their findings and consult with established researchers and clinicians were among the primary goals of ACTRIMS Forum 2016. The event drew more than 600 participants to New Orleans.

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A small regulatory RNA called microRNA-155 appears to play a key role in the brain inflammation that helps foster Parkinson’s disease. This finding, using a mouse model, implicates microRNA-155 as both a potential therapeutic target and biomarker for this progressive neurodegenerative disorder.

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Migraine and tension-type headaches may share genetic links with irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), according to a preliminary study released today that will be presented at the American Academy of Neurology’s 68th Annual Meeting in Vancouver, Canada, April 15 to 21, 2016.

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Dr. Brad Pfeiffer, Assistant Professor of Neuroscience and a Southwestern Medical Foundation Scholar in Biomedical Research at UT Southwestern Medical Center, has been selected as a 2016 Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Research Fellow in Neuroscience.

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While two advanced radiosurgery approaches — Gamma Knife and RapidArc® — offer different strengths, they are equally effective at eradicating cancer in the brain, say researchers at Sidney Kimmel Cancer Center.

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Researchers discover how a bat’s brain screens out sounds not worth paying attention to..

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Immune cells that normally help us fight off bacterial and viral infections may play a far greater role in Alzheimer’s disease than originally thought, according to University of California, Irvine neurobiologists with the Sue & Bill Gross Stem Cell Research Center and the Institute for Memory Impairments and Neurological Disorders.

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Cognitive and functional recovery after a stroke or traumatic injury requires intense rehabilitative therapy to help the brain repair and restructure itself. New findings by researchers at University of California, San Diego School of Medicine report that not only is rehabilitation vital but that a longer, even more intense period of rehabilitation may produce even greater benefit.

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A newly discovered human gene mutation appears to contribute both to unusual sleep patterns and to heightened rates of seasonal depression, according to new research from UC San Francisco.

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A research team, led by an IU School of Health and Rehabilitation faculty member at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, has determined that adapted yoga is both feasible and beneficial for adults with stroke or traumatic brain injury.

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A medication approved to treat various respiratory diseases and that has demonstrated neuroprotective effects in preclinical studies is the focus of a new clinical trial for Parkinson’s disease.

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New research by Kofler at FSU’s Children’s Learning Clinic shows that children often fidget or move when they are trying to solve a problem, and that movement may have a positive effect on children with ADHD.

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A chemist at Washington University in St. Louis hopes to develop bifunctional compounds that can be both therapeutic and diagnostic agents for Alzheimer’s disease. In the first role, they would block the metal-mediated formation of amyloid beta oligomers; in the second, they would be loaded with a long-lived radioistope (Cu-64) and employed as PET imaging agents.

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Why does sleeping on it help? This is the question tackled by new research at the University of Bristol, which reveals how brain activity during sleep sorts through the huge number of experiences we encounter every day, filing only the important information in memory.

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After a motorcycle accident at age 19 left Sasha Rabchevsky paralyzed from the chest down, he pursued a career of discovery to understand his condition and if not cure it, figure out why there is no cure.

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More than 500 clinicians and researchers are meeting in New Orleans to share the latest information about progressive multiple sclerosis.

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A UCLA-led collaboration has identified a specific network of genes and a pattern of gene expression mice that promote repair in the peripheral nervous system in a mouse model. This network, the researchers found, does not exist in the central nervous system. The researchers also found a drug that can promote nerve regeneration in the central nervous system.

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Reporting on the results of a phase III international clinical trial, Johns Hopkins Medicine physicians say use of a cardiac clot-busting drug to treat strokes that cause brain bleeding safely decreased the death rate in patients by 10 percent, compared to a control group receiving saline.

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Risk of long-term stroke equally and effectively lowered in stenting and invasive surgery procedures.

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Stenting and surgery are equally effective at lowering the long-term risk of stroke from a narrowed carotid artery, according to results of CREST – a 10-year, federally funded clinical trial led by researchers at Mayo Clinic’s campus in Florida. The results are being published today online in the New England Journal of Medicine and presented at the American Heart Association’s International Stroke Conference in Los Angeles.