Researchers at Johns Hopkins have found that high normal uric acid (UA) levels may cause barely detectable mini strokes that potentially contribute to mental decline in aging adults.
Diet, exercise and drugs like allopurinol (all of which lower UA levels) could eventually be of value in reducing this risk, especially for those with additional risk factors [...]
Whether it’s a mugger or a friend who jumps out of the bushes, you’re still surprised. But your response — to flee or to hug — must be very different. Now, researchers have begun to distinguish the circuitry in the brain’s emotion center that processes surprise from the circuitry that processes the aversive or reward [...]
A remarkable change takes place in the brains of tiny songbirds every year, and some day the mechanism controlling that change may help researchers develop treatments for age-related degenerative diseases of the brain such as Parkinson’s and dementia.
Writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers from the University of Washington and the [...]
By mining evidence from the classic films made by Mitchell and Kenyon, researchers have confirmed that the left-handed minority suffered something of a setback in Victorian England, at the beginning of the 20th century. In more recent times, lefties’ numbers quickly rose again, the researchers report in Current Biology, a publication of Cell Press.
“Left-handedness is [...]
Scientists have discovered how the gene mutation responsible for fragile X syndrome–the most common inherited form of mental retardation–alters the way brain cells communicate. In neurons cultured from laboratory rats, the scientists also were able to reverse the effects of the mutation using a drug targeted to the specific site in an upstream pathway of [...]
MIT researchers report that tiny, spontaneous releases of the brain’s primary chemical messengers could be regulated, potentially giving scientists unprecedented control over how the brain is wired.
The work, to be published in the Sept. 16 early online edition of Nature Neuroscience, could lead to a better [...]
Subplate neurons — once thought to die after directing the wiring of the cerebral cortex or gray matter– remain in the white matter of the adult brain in small numbers and maintain activity, communicating with other neurons in the brain said researchers from Baylor College of Medicine and the University of Alabama at Birmingham in [...]
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) Roadmap for Medical Research will fund nine interdisciplinary research consortia as a means of integrating aspects of different disciplines to address health challenges that have been resistant to traditional research approaches. The funding of these consortia represents a fundamental change in both the culture within which biomedical and behavioral [...]
When a slipped disc is the source of severe back pain, a trapped or inflamed nerve is usually the cause. In the case of a slipped disc, the disc moves from its original position and presses on the nerve root. As a consequence, certain messenger substances of the immune system, such as Interleukin-1 or TNF-alpha, [...]
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