Brain

Cancer survivors of childhood brain tumors show significant deficits in intelligence, educational achievement and employment, even decades after treatment, an unprecedented study at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital has found. The researchers said their findings will help guide efforts to prevent and alleviate such problems.

Tara Brinkman, Ph.D., an assistant member of the St. Jude Departments of Epidemiology and Cancer Control, and of Psychology, led a team of researchers whose findings were published online today in the Journal of Clinical Oncology.

OAK BROOK, Ill. - Researchers are using a mathematical tool to help determine which concussion patients will go on to suffer migraine headaches, according to a new study published online in the journal Radiology.

Members of the public find the risks of climate engineering technology more likely than any of the benefits, according to an article published in the current edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Research from the University of Rochester finds that caring for others dips during adolescence. But when young people feel supported from their social circles, their concern for others rebound.

Researchers at Chapman University, UCLA, and Stanford have just published work on how news media coverage shapes perceptions of obesity. They examined how perspectives on obesity portrayed in news articles affect people's support for different obesity-related public policies and their prejudice towards fat men and women.

A new study indicates that a noninvasive treatment that stimulates nerves through an electrical impulse many help patients with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and major depression.

The technique, called External Trigeminal Nerve Stimulation, was delivered to 12 patients who used a device nightly for 8 weeks. Patients experienced significant improvements in symptoms related to PTSD and depression, and scores related to quality of life increased.

The distinctive troughs and crests of the human brain are not present in most animals; highly folded brains are seen only in a handful of species, including some primates, dolphins, elephants and pigs. In humans, folding begins in fetal brains around the 20th week of gestation and is completed only when the child is about a year and a half.

Why the brain is folded can be rationalized easily from an evolutionary perspective; folded brains likely evolved to fit a large cortex into a small volume with the benefit of reducing neuronal wiring length and improving cognitive function.

Over the last decade, important contributions to our understanding of schizophrenia have come from two different types of studies.

Marijuana use over time was associated with remembering fewer words from a list but it did not appear to affect other areas of cognitive function in a study of men and women followed up over 25 years, according to an article published online by JAMA Internal Medicine.

Marijuana use is common among adolescents and young adults. It remains unclear whether there are long-term effects from low-intensity or occasional marijuana use earlier in life and whether the magnitude and persistence of impairment depends on the duration of marijuana use or the age of exposure.

Caltech biologists have modified a harmless virus in such a way that it can successfully enter the adult mouse brain through the bloodstream and deliver genes to cells of the nervous system. The virus could help researchers map the intricacies of the brain and holds promise for the delivery of novel therapeutics to address diseases such as Alzheimer's and Huntington's. In addition, the screening approach the researchers developed to identify the virus could be used to make additional vectors capable of targeting cells in other organs.

A study led by the University of Southampton has found there is no difference in the time it takes people from different countries to read and process different languages.

The research, published in the journal Cognition, finds the same amount of time is needed for a person, from for example China, to read and understand a text in Mandarin, as it takes a person from Britain to read and understand a text in English - assuming both are reading their native language.

The mechanisms underlying the stability and plasticity of neural circuits in the hippocampus, the part of the brain responsible for spatial memory and the memory of everyday facts and events, has been a major focus of study in the field of neuroscience. Understanding precisely how a "healthy" brain stores and processes information is crucial to preventing and reversing the memory failures associated with Alzheimer's disease (AD), the most common form of late-life dementia.

CHICAGO --- Scientists have demonstrated for the first time that it is possible to specifically modify gene expression in diseased upper motor neurons, brain cells that break down in ALS.

The new Northwestern Medicine study, published in Nature Gene Therapy, provides evidence that lays a foundation for developing future gene replacement therapies to treat patients with the fatal neuromuscular disorder.

A study by researchers at Vanderbilt University Medical Center is offering a glimmer of hope to alcoholics who find it hard to remain sober because their abstinence is hounded by stubborn, difficult-to-treat depression.

Using an anesthetic drug that also has antidepressant properties, and another drug that raises levels of a mood-enhancing natural chemical in the brain, the researchers found that they could alleviate depressive-like symptoms in a mouse model of alcoholism.

DARIEN, IL - A new study suggests that frequent shifts in sleep timing may be related to adverse metabolic health among non-shift working, midlife women.