Brain

Japanese research group led by Professor Junichi Nabekura in National Institute for Physiological Sciences, NIPS, Japan, found that, after cerebral stroke in one side of the mouse brain, another side of the brain rewires its neural circuits to recuperate from damaged neural function. The Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST) supported this study. They report their finding in Journal of Neuroscience, on August 12, 2009.

CHICAGO - In a recent national survey, a substantial minority of physicians erroneously believed that certain off-label uses of prescription drugs were approved by the Food and Drug Administration. This mistaken belief could encourage them to prescribe these drugs, despite the lack of scientific evidence supporting such use.

Different types of dementia show dissimilar changes in brain activity. A network mapping technique described in the open access journal BMC Neuroscience has been applied to EEG data obtained from patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) and frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD, a less common type of dementia with more prominent behavioral symptoms).

CINCINNATI—The risks associated with treating a recurrent or residual brain aneurysm that was initially treated by endovascular coiling are low, according to a multicenter study led by researchers at the University of Cincinnati (UC) Neuroscience Institute.

In the study of 311 patients with coiled aneurysms who underwent retreatment procedures at eight academic health centers, the risk of death or permanent major disability was slightly over one in 100, or 1.28 percent.

It's easy to list the negative stereotypes attributed to the elderly: they are considered forgetful, hard-of-hearing, absent-minded and confused.

What's unsettling is that those stereotypes can be present in children as young as two or three.

Research conducted by the University of Alberta's Sheree Kwong See, a psychology researcher, has identified that those stereotypes exist in some children at that age, which could adversely affect them when they are older.

Bats, birds, box turtles, humans and many other animals share at least one thing in common: They sleep. Humans, in fact, spend roughly one-third of their lives asleep, but sleep researchers still don't know why.

A new special issue of The Gerontologist has identified for the first time how ethnically, culturally, linguistically, and geographically diverse groups think about aging and brain health.

Your nostrils may seem to be a happy pair, working together to pick up scents. However, a study published online on August 20th in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication, reveals that there can actually be a kind of rivalry between the two.

With nothing to guide their way, people attempting to walk a straight course through unfamiliar territory really do end up walking in circles, according to a report published online on August 20th in Current Biology. Although that belief has pervaded popular culture, there has been no scientific evidence to back it up - until now.

When the nose encounters two different scents simultaneously, the brain processes them separately through each nostril in an alternating fashion.

This finding by researchers at Rice University in Houston is the first demonstration of "perceptual rivalry" in the olfactory system. The study was published online today by the journal Current Biology and will appear in the Sept. 29 print edition.

A blood test can now be used to detect brain damage in amateur boxers. Deterioration of nerve cells seems to occur even after a two-month break from boxing. This is shown in a new study from the Sahlgrenska Academy at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden.

The results of the study conducted by researchers at the Sahlgrenska Academy and the Erciyes University Medical School in Turkey are published in the current issue of the scientific journal Brain Injury.

The findings constitute further evidence that repeated blows to the head may damage the brain.

Today's youngsters are buried under homework, which gobbles up free time that could be spent with family or friends. Parents, puzzled whether to help their children dig out from a pile of books or allow them to carry on alone, are frustrated by the take-home workload. And they're angry at the stress the immense amounts of homework can put on their whole family.

Sound familiar?

That's the current conventional wisdom about homework, which is often perpetuated in the popular press through stories of stressed-out schoolchildren and perplexed parents.

A study from the Center for Molecular Genetics at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine shows that a gene called HPRT plays an important role in setting the program by which primitive or precursor cells decide to become normal nerve cells in the human brain. This unconventional view of metabolic genes known as "housekeeping" genes is now online at the journal Molecular Therapy.

There is no known cure for neurodegenerative diseases such as Huntington's, Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. But new hope, in the form of stem cells created from the patient's own bone marrow, can be found ― and literally seen ― in laboratories at Tel Aviv University.