Brain

In the second in a six part series on treating mental health problems in resource-poor settings, Caroline Mbuba and Charles Newton (Centre for Geographic Medicine Research, Kenya Medical Research Institute, Kilifi, Kenya) discuss "packages of care" for treating epilepsy.

Packages of care are combinations of treatments aimed at improving the recognition and management of conditions to achieve optimal outcomes.

Cognitive abilities other than memory, including visuospatial skills needed to perceive relationships between objects, may decline years prior to a clinical diagnosis in patients with Alzheimer's disease, according to a report in the October issue of Archives of Neurology, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.

By examining data from a 20-year-old clinical trial, a research team based at the MassGeneral Institute for Neurodegenerative Diseases (MGH-MIND) and Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH), has found evidence supporting the findings of their 2008 study – that elevated levels of the antioxidant urate may slow the progression of Parkinson's disease.

Individuals with Parkinson's disease who have higher levels of a metabolite called urate in their blood and in cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) have a slower rate of disease progression, according to a study funded by the National Institutes of Health. A clinical trial is under way to examine the safety and potential benefits of supplemental urate elevation for recently diagnosed Parkinson's patients who have low urate levels.

Chinese-speaking children with dyslexia have a disorder that is distinctly different, and perhaps more complicated and severe, than that of English speakers. Those differences can be seen in the brain and in the performance of Chinese children on visual and oral language tasks, reveals a report published online on October 12th in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication.

St. Louis, Oct. 8, 2009 — Spontaneous brain activity formerly thought to be "white noise" measurably changes after a person learns a new task, researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and the University of Chieti, Italy, have shown.

Scientists also report that the degree of change reflects how well subjects have learned to perform the task. Their study is published online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

STANFORD, Calif. — Researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have identified a key molecular player in guiding the formation of synapses — the all-important connections between nerve cells — in the brain. This discovery, based on experiments in cell culture and in mice, could advance scientists' understanding of how young children's brains develop as well as point to new approaches toward countering brain disorders in adults.

SAO PAULO, BRAZIL ― A team of researchers led by The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center unveiled results today from the largest-ever collaborative study addressing the treatment of a rare pediatric brain tumor. The findings suggest a new standard protocol could improve survival nearly two-fold for pediatric patients with choroid plexus tumors, as reported at the 41st Annual Meeting of the International Society of Pediatric Oncology (SIOP).

Individuals who follow the Mediterranean dietary pattern which is rich in vegetables, fruits, nuts, whole grains and fish appear less likely to develop depression, according to a report of the University of Navarra, published in the October issue of Archives of General Psychiatry.

A sophisticated computational algorithm, applied to a large set of gene markers, has achieved greater accuracy than conventional methods in assessing individual risk for type 1 diabetes.

A research team led by Hakon Hakonarson, M.D., Ph.D., director of the Center for Applied Genomics at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, suggests that their technique, applied to appropriate complex multigenic diseases, improves the prospects for personalizing medicine to an individual's genetic profile. The study appears in the October 9 issue of the online journal PLoS Genetics.

LOS ANGELES (Oct. 8, 2009) – Premature aging of the immune system appears to play a role in the development of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), or Lou Gehrig's disease, according to research scientists from the Maxine Dunitz Neurosurgical Institute at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, and Sheba Medical Center in Israel.

Chicago, Ill. (October 8, 2009) – Women with breast cancer reduced stress and improved their mental health and emotional well being through the Transcendental Meditation technique, according to a new study published in the current issue of the peer-reviewed Integrative Cancer Therapies (Vol. 8, No. 3: September 2009).

Hispanic children diagnosed with brain tumors get high-quality treatment at hospitals that specialize in neurosurgery far less often than other children with the same condition, potentially compromising their immediate prognosis and long-term survival, according to research from Johns Hopkins published in October's Pediatrics.

The findings of a study published in Science today (9th October 2009) turn a long-held theory on circadian rhythms on its head and mean that we may now be able to develop new drugs and approaches to tune the daily clock to treat sleep disorders and to aid recovery from long-distance flights.

ANN ARBOR, Mich.---University of Michigan mathematicians and their British colleagues say they have identified the signal that the brain sends to the rest of the body to control biological rhythms, a finding that overturns a long-held theory about our internal clock.