Attention, college students cramming between midterms and finals: Binging on soda and sweets for as little as six weeks may make you stupid. A new UCLA rat study is the first to show how a diet steadily high in fructose slows the brain, hampering memory and learning -- and how omega-3 fatty acids can counteract the disruption. The peer-reviewed Journal of Physiol... (read more)
Making ultrasound or MRI part of the annual mammography regimen boosts breast cancer detection in women with dense breasts who are at elevated risk, but also increases false positives, a clinical trial affirmed. After the initial dual screening looking for prevalent cancers, incidence screening with ultrasound found an additional 3.7 cancers per 1,000 screens (P<0.001 ), Wendie A. Berg, MD, PhD, of Magee-Women... (read more)
Smoking alters the impact of a schizophrenia risk gene. Scientists from the universities of Zurich and Cologne demonstrate that healthy people who carry this risk gene and smoke process acoustic stimuli in a similarly deficient way as patients with schizophrenia. Furthermore, the impact is all the stronger the more the person smokes. Schizophrenia has long been known to be hereditary. However, as a melting pot... (read more)
After using electroconvulsive therapy for more than 70 years to treat severe depression, doctors say they now have discovered how it works. Shock therapy, in use since 1937, appears to tamp down an overactive connection between two parts of the brain involved in emotional processing, thinking and concentration, according to a study released today by the Proceedings of the National Academy of... (read more)
Distinct patterns of activity -- which may indicate a predisposition to care for infants-- appear in the brains of adults who view an image of an infant face -- even when the child is not theirs, according to a study by researchers at the National Institutes of Health and in Germany, Italy, and Japan. Seeing images of infant faces appeared to activate in the adult's brains circuits that r... (read more)
For almost as long as women have been living beyond their childbearing years, many have complained about a mental "fog" that seems to descend at about the time of menopause. And you would think those complaints might prompt some smart scientist (a woman herself, perhaps) to seriously investigate those complaints. The questions most women would probably ask are not whether these complaints are real ... (read more)
In both animals and humans, vocal signals used for communication contain a wide array of different sounds that are determined by the vibrational frequencies of vocal cords. For example, the pitch of someone's voice, and how it changes as they are speaking, depends on a complex series of varying frequencies. Knowing how the brain sorts out these different frequen... (read more)
Despite a century of research, memory encoding in the brain has remained mysterious. Neuronal synaptic connection strengths are involved, but synaptic components are short-lived while memories last lifetimes. This suggests synaptic information is encoded and hard-wired at a deeper, finer-grained molecular scale. In an article in the March 8 issue of the journal PLoS Computational Biology, physicists Travis Cradd... (read more)
Opening the door to the development of thought-controlled prosthetic devices to help people with spinal cord injuries, amputations and other impairments, neuroscientists at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Champalimaud Center for the Unknown in Portugal have demonstrated that the brain is more flexible and trainable than previously thought. Their new study, publi... (read more)
Daily doses of a drug used to treat Parkinson’s disease significantly improved function in severely brain-injured people thought to be beyond the reach of treatment, scientists reported on Wednesday, providing the first rigorous evidence to date that any therapy reliably helps such patients. The improvements were modest, experts said, and hardly amounted to a cure, or a quick means of “waking up... (read more)
Brain changes in infants as young as six months of age suggest that MRIs could be used to detect autism in children at least half a year before the emergence of other symptoms, according to a new study published online Friday in the American Journal of Psychiatry. According to Lara Salahi of ABC News, Dr. Joe Piven, director of the University of North Carolina’s (UNC) Carolina Institute for De... (read more)
Scientists have for the first time improved memory by applying direct electrical stimulation to a key area in the brain as it learns its way around a new environment. The stimulation, delivered through electrodes inserted into the brains of epilepsy patients being prepared for surgery, sharply improved performance on a virtual driving game that tests spatial memory, the neural mapping ability th... (read more)
Scientists from The Scripps Research Institute, Scripps Health, and collaborating cancer physicians have successfully demonstrated the effectiveness of an advanced blood test for detecting and analyzing circulating tumor cells (CTCs) -- breakaway cells from patients' solid tumors -- from cancer patients. The findings, reported in five new papers, show that the highly sensitive blood analysis provides information t... (read more)
Drug addicts and their non-addicted siblings share certain features in the brain, suggesting a susceptibility to addiction is inherited but is also a flaw that can be overcome, scientists said on Thursday. Researchers who scanned the brains of 50 pairs of brothers and sisters of whom one was a cocaine addict found that both siblings had brain abnormalities that make it more difficult for them to exercise se... (read more)
Alzheimer’s disease seems to spread like an infection from brain cell to brain cell, two new studies in mice have found. But instead of viruses or bacteria, what is being spread is a distorted protein known as tau. The surprising finding answers a longstanding question and has immediate implications for developing treatments, researchers said. And they suspect that other degenerative brain diseases like Parkin... (read more)
As you listened to your colleagues’ conversations at work today, or to a podcast on the train home, or to your personal trainer shouting lift, your brain completed some complex tasks. The frequencies of syllables and whole words were decoded and given meaning, and you could make sense of the language-filled world we live in without actively thinking about it. Now a team of research... (read more)
An international team of researchers has discovered 13 new regions of the genome associated with the timing of menopause. These genes shed light on the biological pathways involved in reproductive lifespan and will provide insights into conditions connected to menopause, such as breast cancer and heart disease. Menopause is a major hormonal change that affects most women when they are in their early ... (read more)
More than half a century ago, author Aldous Huxley titled his book on his experience with hallucinogens The Doors of Perception, borrowing a phrase from a 1790 William Blake poem (which, yes, also lent Jim Morrison’s band its moniker). Blake wrote: If the doors of perception were cleansed, every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all ... (read more)
Research published by Cell Press in the January 12 issue of the journal Neuron provides fascinating insight into a newly discovered brain mechanism that limits the rewarding impact of cocaine. The study describes protective delayed mechanism that turns off the genes that support the development of addiction-related behaviors. The findings may lead to a better understanding of vulnerability to addic... (read more)
Experts in China scanned the brains of 17 young web addicts and found disruption in the way their brains were wired up. They say the discovery, published in Plos One, could lead to new treatments for addictive behaviour. Internet addiction is a clinical disorder marked by out-of-control internet use. A research team led by Hao Lei of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Wuhan carried out brain scans of... (read more)
Short-term memory plays a crucial role in how our consciousness operates. Several years ago a hypothesis has been formulated, according to which capacity of short-term memory depends in a special way on two cycles of brain electric activity. Scientists from the Nencki Institute of Experimental Biology of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw have now demonstrated this experimentally for the first time. ... (read more)
Find prostate cancer early, save a life. That message has been pervasive since 1986, when a blood test for prostate cancer first hit the market. But more evidence suggests that, in many or even most cases, the message is wrong. The latest blow against prostate-specific antigen (PSA) testing came Friday from a large, long-term study that found routine testing in men ages 55 to 74 did not preve... (read more)
A new research study published in the January 2012 edition of The FASEB Journal describes findings that could lead to a non-invasive test that would let expecting mothers know the sex of their baby as early as the first trimester. Specifically, researchers from South Korea discovered that various ratios of two enzymes (DYS14/GAPDH), which can be extracted from a pregnant mother's blo... (read more)
Different ingredients in marijuana appear to affect regions of the brain differently during brain processing functions involving responses to certain visual stimuli and tasks, according to a report in the January issue of Archives of General Psychiatry, one of the JAMA/Archives journals. Sagnik Bhattacharyya, M.B.B.S., M.D., Ph.D, at the Institute of Psychiatry, King's ... (read more)
Children with type 1 diabetes may be more likely to have sleep problems that worsen not only their blood sugar control, but also their quality of life, researchers found. Diabetic children with more nightly apnea events had significantly higher glucose levels and spent more time in hyperglycemia than young type 1 diabetics without sleep disturbances, Michelle Perfect, PhD, of the University of Arizon... (read more)
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