Brain

Yale researchers have taken the first critical steps in unraveling the mysteries of brain aneurysms, the often fatal rupturing of blood vessels that afflicts 500,000 people worldwide each year and nearly killed Vice President-elect Joseph Biden two decades ago.

St. Louis, Nov. 9, 2007 — Mark Twain, a skeptic of the idea of free will, argues in his essay "What Is Man?" that humans do not command their minds or the opinions they form.

"You did not form that [opinion]," a speaker identified as "old man" says in the essay. "Your [mental] machinery did it for you—automatically and instantly, without reflection or the need of it."

Several presentations by deCODE genetics (Nasdaq:DCGN) scientists and independent researchers at the American Heart Association Scientific Sessions 2008 being held at the New Orleans Convention Center from November 8 to12 are expected to expand upon the clinical utility of evaluating individual risk of heart attack, or atrial fibrillation and stroke, respectively, by measuring the genetic markers that are the basis of the deCODE MI™ and deCODE AF™ tests.

A collaborative study led by investigators from Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) is giving what may be the first look at how interactions between genes underlie a key symptom of schizophrenia, impaired working memory. Functional imaging studies reveal how a combination of common variants in two genes is associated with reduced activity of important brain structures in schizophrenia patients but not in normal controls. The report has been released online in the Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - Research suggests U.S. motorists are growing increasingly cynical about the relevance of speed limits, and a new study indicates many motorists are more likely to think they can drive safely while speeding as long as they won't get caught.

"So the faster you think you can go before getting a ticket, the more likely you are to think safety's not compromised at higher speeds," said Fred Mannering, a professor of civil engineering at Purdue University.

October 31, 2008 -- Children under the age of three who had hernia surgery showed almost twice the risk of behavioral or developmental problems later compared to children who had not undergone the surgery, according to a study by researchers at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health and the College of Physicians and Surgeons. The study included 383 children who were born into the New York State Medicaid system between 1999 and 2001 who had surgery performed under general anesthesia to repair a groin hernia.

A computer model that can predict how people will complete a controlled task and how the knowledge needed to complete that task develops over time is the product of a group of researchers, led by a professor from Penn State's College of Information Sciences and Technology.

Frank Ritter, associate professor of IST and psychology, and his research associates, used the Soar programming language, which is designed to represent human knowledge, on a 20-trial circuit troubleshooting task most recently done by 10 students at the University of Nottingham, UK.

Unusually aggressive youth may actually enjoy inflicting pain on others, research using brain scans at the University of Chicago shows.

Scans of the aggressive youth's brains showed that an area that is associated with rewards was highlighted when the youth watched a video clip of someone inflicting pain on another person. Youth without the unusually aggressive behavior did not have that response, the study showed.

Humanoid robots have been used to show that that functional hierarchy in the brain is linked to time as well as space. Researchers from RIKEN Brain Science Institute, Japan, have created a new type of neural network model which adds to the previous literature that suggests neural activity is linked solely to spatial hierarchy within the animal brain. Details are published November 7 in the open-access journal PLoS Computational Biology.

For most patients with chronic kidney disease (CKD), the risk of experiencing a cardiovascular related death is greater than the risk of progressing to end-stage renal disease (ESRD). According to research being presented at the American Society of Nephrology's 41st Annual Meeting and Scientific Exposition in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, African Americans with CKD caused by high blood pressure (hypertensive nephrosclerosis) demonstrated a higher risk of progressing to ESRD than dying from heart disease related events.

"The increasing number of veterans with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) raises the risk of domestic violence and its consequences on families and children in communities across the United States," says Monica Matthieu, Ph.D., an expert on veteran mental health and an assistant professor of social work at Washington University in St. Louis.

Atlanta, Ga. – November 06, 2008 – Down syndrome, the most commonly identified cause of cognitive impairment, occurs in approximately 1-in-700 births in the United States. Additionally, nearly 80 percent of fetuses with Down syndrome are lost before birth.

Indianapolis, Ind. – November 06, 2008 – A major issue in the development of regenerative medicine is the cell sources used to rebuild damaged tissues. In a review of the issue published in Developmental Dynamics, researchers state that inducing regeneration in humans from the body's own tissues by chemical means is feasible, though many questions must be answered before the process can reach clinical status.

Boston, MA—Silencing natural growth inhibitors may make it possible to regenerate nerves damaged by brain or spinal cord injury, finds a study from Children's Hospital Boston. In a mouse study published in the November 7 issue of Science, researchers temporarily silenced genes that prevent mature neurons from regenerating, and caused them to recover and re-grow vigorously after damage.

An Australian-led global initiative to improve the diagnosis of genetic disorders and reduce errors in the reporting of genetic variations has been published today in the prestigious scientific journal Science.

"There is a staggering error rate of up to 40 percent in some reporting of genetic variations," said Professor Richard Cotton, lead author of the paper, Convenor of the Human Variome Project and honorary researcher at the University of Melbourne.