Brain

Washington, DC – (Nov. 17, 2008) – At least one in four of the 697,000 U.S. veterans of the 1991 Gulf War suffer from Gulf War illness, a condition caused by exposure to toxic chemicals, including pesticides and a drug administered to protect troops against nerve gas, and no effective treatments have yet been found, a federal panel of scientific experts and veterans concludes in a landmark report released Monday.

November 17, 2008 (Baltimore, MD)—A study published today in the online advance edition of The American Journal of Psychiatry for the first time reveals shape differences in the brains of children with ADHD, which could help pinpoint the specific neural circuits involved in the disorder. Researchers from the Kennedy Krieger Institute in Baltimore, Md. and the Johns Hopkins Center for Imaging Science used a new analysis tool, large deformation diffeomorphic mapping (LDDMM), which allowed them to examine the precise shape of the basal ganglia.

CHICAGO --- Maybe you have an 85-year-old grandfather who still whips through the newspaper crossword puzzle every morning or a 94-year-old aunt who never forgets a name or a face. They don't seem to suffer the ravages of memory that beset most people as they age.

Thanks to our ability to learn and to remember, we can perform tasks that other living things can not even dream of. However, we are only just beginning to get the gist of what really goes on in the brain when it learns or forgets something. What we do know is that changes in the contacts between nerve cells play an important role. But can these structural changes account for that well-known phenomenon that it is much easier to re-learn something that was forgotten than to learn something completely new?

HOUSTON -- (Nov. 17, 2008) -- A "chip" or array that can quickly detect disorders such as Down syndrome or other diseases associated with chromosomal abnormalities proved an effective tool in prenatal diagnosis in a series of 300 cases at Baylor College of Medicine, said researchers in a report that appears in the current issue of the journal Prenatal Diagnosis.

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Scientists have identified a relationship between two proteins in the brain that has links to both nicotine addiction and autism. The finding has led to speculation that existing drugs used to curb nicotine addiction might serve as the basis for potential therapies to alleviate the symptoms of autism.

Montreal, November 17th, 2008 – "How will our loved one come out of this?" After an accident that results in severe traumatic brain injury (sTBI), the answer to this simple question can change everything for a family.

Sleep helps the mind learn complicated tasks and helps people recover learning they otherwise thought they had forgotten over the course of a day, research at the University of Chicago shows.

Using a test that involved learning to play video games, researchers showed for the first time that people who had "forgotten" how to perform a complex task 12 hours after training found that those abilities were restored after a night's sleep.

LIVERPOOL, UK – 17 November 2008: Famous works of abstract art achieve popularity by using shapes that resonate with the neural mechanisms in the brain linked to visual information, a psychologist at the University of Liverpool has discovered.

Aucott et al. report the first in vivo experiments on the heterochromatin protein 1 (HP1) family, which sidles up to silent DNA. The results, to be published in the Nov. 17 issue of the Journal of Cell Biology, add to the evidence that the different versions of the proteins help cells fix broken DNA.

COLUMBUS, Ohio – A new study provides the best evidence to date that a psychological intervention program designed for breast cancer patients not only improves their health – it actually increases their chance of survival.

Researchers at Ohio State University's Comprehensive Cancer Center found that patients participating in an intervention program reduced their risk of dying of breast cancer by 56 percent after an average of 11 years.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (November 17, 2008) – "Huntington's disease presents an ideal vantage point to study neurodegenerative disease, because we know the misfolded protein that's responsible," says Martin Duennwald, formerly a postdoctoral researcher in the lab of Whitehead Member Susan Lindquist. "But we don't understand how this protein causes cellular damage and death for the neurons that are affected."

WASHINGTON, D.C. — When given a choice between viewing pictures of cocaine and a variety of other images, cocaine addicted individuals, as compared to healthy, non-addicted research subjects, show a clear preference for the drug-related images. Findings from this study, which was conducted at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory, will be presented at the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting in Washington D.C. on Sunday, November 16, 2008, at 2:30 p.m.

Microvesicles – tiny membrane-covered sacs – released from glioblastoma cells contain molecules that may provide data that can guide treatment of the deadly brain tumor. In their report in the December 2008 Nature Cell Biology, which is receiving early online release, Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) researchers describe finding tumor-associated RNA and proteins in membrane microvesicles called exosomes in blood samples from glioblastoma patients.

CHICAGO --- Maybe you have an 85-year-old grandfather who still whips through the newspaper crossword puzzle every morning or a 94-year-old aunt who never forgets a name or a face. They don't seem to suffer the ravages of memory that beset most people as they age.