Brain

CHICAGO — Animal research is suggesting new ways to aid recovery after spinal cord injury. New studies demonstrate that diet affects recovery rate and show how to make stem cell therapies safer for spinal injury patients. The findings were presented at Neuroscience 2009, the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience and the world's largest source of emerging news on brain science and health.

New research released today is affirming a long-held maxim: you are what you eat — and, more to the point, what you eat has a profound influence on the brain. The findings offer insight into the neurobiological factors behind the obesity epidemic in the United States and other developed countries. The findings exposed changes in brain chemistry due to diet and weight gain, and were reported at Neuroscience 2009, the Society for Neuroscience's annual meeting and the world's largest source of emerging news about brain science and health.

CHICAGO -- Researchers say antiepilectic drug treatments administered when the brain is developing appear to trigger schizophrenia-like behavior in animal models. In humans, having a history of seizures in infancy is a significant risk factor for development of schizophrenia later in life, but it is not known whether the elevated risk is due to seizures themselves, or from side effects antiepileptic drug (AED) treatment.

CHICAGO — Research presented today at Neuroscience 2009, the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience (SfN) and the world's largest source of emerging news about brain science and health, provide further insights into brain mechanisms, including those involved in music, social interaction, learning and memory.

Specific research released today:

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig's disease, is a neurodegenerative disease that causes progressive weakness, disability, and death. Treatments are largely palliative. Using mice carrying the mutated form of the human SOD1 gene that causes inherited forms of ALS, however, Berislav Zlokovic and colleagues, at the University of Rochester Medical Center, Rochester, have now found that administration of the protein APC slows disease progression and extends survival.

A chemical cousin of a drug currently used to treat sepsis dramatically slows the progression of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, better known as ALS or Lou Gehrig's disease, in mice. The results offer a bit of good news in efforts to develop a therapy to stop or slow the progression of a disease that generally kills its victims within just a few years.

CHICAGO -- Glutamate is to the brain like coffee is to our bodies. A cup of Joe in the morning can wake us, but overloading on caffeine causes the stimulant to work against us.

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Scientists have countered findings of previous clinical trials by showing that giving supplemental oxygen to animals during a stroke can reduce damage to brain tissue surrounding the clot.

The timing of the delivery of 100 percent oxygen – either by mask or in a hyperbaric chamber – is critical to achieving the benefit, however.

WASHINGTON, D.C.—October 19, 2009—Everyone tends to float off into space once in a while and fail to see what is sitting there right in front of them. Recently researchers decided to put the theory of "inattentional blindness" to the test: the unicycling clown test. They documented real-world examples of people who were so distracted by their cell phone use that they failed to see the bizarre occurrence of a unicycling clown passing them on the street. The study is published in an upcoming issue of Applied Cognitive Psychology.

Infants as young as five months old are able to correctly identify humans as the source of speech and monkeys as the source of monkey calls, psychology researchers have found. Their finding, which appears in the latest issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), provides the first evidence that human infants are able to correctly match different kinds of vocalizations to different species.

What's New: MIT researchers have identified populations of neurons that code time with extreme precision in the primate brain. These neurons are found in two interconnected brain regions, the prefrontal cortex and the striatum, both of which are known to play critical roles in learning, movement, and thought control.

PASADENA, Calif.—Scientists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have created a remote-controlled robot that is able to simulate the "visual" experience of a blind person who has been implanted with a visual prosthesis, such as an artificial retina. An artificial retina consists of a silicon chip studded with a varying number of electrodes that directly stimulate retinal nerve cells. It is hoped that this approach may one day give blind persons the freedom of independent mobility.

Montreal, Canada, and Chicago, IL, October 19, 2009 – Angiochem, Inc. a clinical-stage biotechnology company developing drugs that are uniquely capable of crossing the blood-brain barrier to treat brain diseases, announced today that its lead drug candidate, ANG1005, has demonstrated a favorable safety and efficacy profile in more than 100 patients with brain cancer from two separate Phase 1 /2 clinical studies in patients with progressive gliomas, including recurrent glioblastoma, and in patients with progressive brain metastases.

You can teach an old dog new tricks, say UCLA scientists who found that middle-aged and older adults with little Internet experience were able to trigger key centers in the brain that control decision-making and complex reasoning after just one week of surfing the Web.

The findings, presented Oct. 19 at the 2009 meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, suggest that Internet training can stimulate neural activation patterns and could potentially enhance brain function and cognition in older adults.

Children who have had an episode of diabetic ketoacidosis, a common complication of diabetes, may have persistent memory problems, according to a new study from researchers at the UC Davis Center for Mind and Brain.