Brain

San Diego - A brain scan with functional MRI (fMRI) is enough to predict which patients with pediatric anxiety disorder will respond to "talk therapy," and so may not need to use psychiatric medication, say neuroscientists from Georgetown University Medical Center.

Their study, being presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in San Diego, showed that children and adolescents, ages 8 to16, who show fear when looking at happy faces on a screen inside an fMRI scanner were those who had least success with an eight-week course of cognitive behavioral therapy.

Heart experts at Johns Hopkins say that physicians might be drawing conclusions too soon about irreversible brain damage in patients surviving cardiac arrest whose bodies were for a day initially chilled into a calming coma.

Neuroscience researchers from the Yerkes National Primate Research Center, Emory University, will present a wide range of research topics at the Society for Neuroscience's 40th annual meeting in San Diego, Nov. 13-17, 2010. The information below is a representation of the neuroscience research Yerkes scientists will be discussing. To learn more about ongoing research and scientific resources available at the Yerkes Research Center and the other seven national primate research centers, please visit exhibit booth 3817.

As humans, we spend about a third of our lives asleep. So there must be a point to it, right? Scientists have found that sleep helps consolidate memories, fixing them in the brain so we can retrieve them later. Now, new research is showing that sleep also seems to reorganize memories, picking out the emotional details and reconfiguring the memories to help you produce new and creative ideas, according to the authors of an article in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

Amsterdam, The Netherlands and San Antonio, TX, USA, November 12, 2010 – There is growing global concern regarding the potential neurotoxicity of anesthetics. Biophysical and animal model studies have identified molecular changes simulating Alzheimer's disease (AD) pathology after exposure to inhaled anesthetics. This research has alerted anesthesiologists, neuropsychologists, surgeons and other clinicians to initiate in-depth clinical research on the role of anesthetics in post operative cognitive decline.

Patients with obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) may blame their daytime difficulties on simple sleepiness, but new research suggests that their brains may be to blame. Specifically, their cognitive challenges may be caused by structural deficits in gray matter, brought on by the intermittent oxygen deprivation that comes with OSA. The good news is that these deficits may be partially or fully reversible with early detection and treatment, according to Italian researchers.

The brain, a complex network

The human brain is composed of 100 billion individual nerve cells which communicate with each other via a complex network of connections. Errors in communications of these cells are often at the basis of brain and nerve diseases such as Alzheimer's and multiple sclerosis. In the search for possible solutions to these diseases, one important aspect is to understand how the connections between nerve cells develop.

Drosophila as a model organism

St. Louis, MO, November 11, 2010 – The November 2010 issue of the Archives of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, Official Journal of the American Congress of Rehabilitation Medicine, has published a set of 9 articles on traumatic brain injury (TBI) that will accelerate future research in the field by establishing common language for the degree of injury, how it is measured and classified, treatment and potential outcomes.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- People spend 46.9 percent of their waking hours thinking about something other than what they're doing, and this mind-wandering typically makes them unhappy. So says a study that used an iPhone web app to gather 250,000 data points on subjects' thoughts, feelings, and actions as they went about their lives.

The research, by psychologists Matthew A. Killingsworth and Daniel T. Gilbert of Harvard University, is described this week in the journal Science.

STANFORD, Calif. — One protein single-handedly controls the growth of blood vessels into the developing brains of mice embryos, according to researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine. Understanding how the protein, a cellular receptor, functions could help clinicians battle brain tumors and stroke by choking off or supplementing vital blood-vessel development, and may enhance the delivery of drugs across the blood-brain barrier.

New Rochelle, NY, November 11, 2010—Yoga has a greater positive effect on a person's mood and anxiety level than walking and other forms of exercise, which may be due to higher levels of the brain chemical GABA according to an article in The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, a peer-reviewed journal published by Mary Ann Liebert, Inc. The article is available free online.

LA JOLLA, CA—A collaborative effort between researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and the University of California, San Diego, successfully used human induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells derived from patients with Rett syndrome to replicate autism in the lab and study the molecular pathogenesis of the disease.

They show that one of those genes in particular has a long evolutionary history, as evidenced by the fact that it plays a role in pain sensing in flies, mice and humans. At least in mice, the newly described gene is also linked to a condition known in humans as synesthesia, in which one sensory experience triggers the perception of another sense.

"We found lots of new genes and pathways that have never been implicated in pain before," said Josef Penninger of the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.

Fear arises in the almond-shaped brain structure known as the amygdala. It is the amygdala which processes the strange noise, shadowy figure or scary face and not only triggers palpitations or nausea but can also cause us to flee or freeze. That much has long been known about the function of this part of the brain. What remains largely unclear, however, is precisely how fear develops, and which of the countless neurons in the amygdaloid region are involved in this process.

The computer game Tetris may have a special ability to reduce flashbacks after viewing traumatic images not shared by other types of computer game, Oxford University scientists have discovered in a series of experiments.

In earlier laboratory work the Oxford team showed that playing Tetris after traumatic events could reduce memory flashbacks in healthy volunteers. These are a laboratory model of the types of intrusive memories associated with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).