Brain

CHICAGO - The area of the brain associated with impulsivity and the development of obsessive-compulsive disorder is activated in obese children when introduced to food smells, according to a study being presented next week at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA).

Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute scientists have uncovered a mechanism in the brain that could account for some of the neural degeneration and memory loss in people with Alzheimer's disease.

New findings from New Zealand's University of Otago suggest older toddlers--those aged around 32 months old--are picking up on the anti-fat attitudes of their mothers.

The study, involving researchers from New Zealand, Australia, and the US, comes on the back of studies showing that obesity prejudice and discrimination are on the rise.

Professor Ted Ruffman, from Otago's Department of Psychology, says "anti-fat prejudice is associated with social isolation, depression, psychiatric symptoms, low self-esteem and poor body image".

DURHAM, N.C. - Researchers at Duke and Stanford Universities have devised a way to watch the details of neurons at work, pretty much in real time.

Every second of every day, the 100 billion neurons in your brain are capable of firing off a burst of electricity called an action potential up to 100 times per second. For neurologists trying to study how this overwhelming amount of activity across an entire brain translates into specific thoughts and behaviors, they need a faster way to watch.

Loneliness is more than a feeling: For older adults, perceived social isolation is a major health risk that can increase the risk of premature death by 14 percent.

Researchers have long known the dangers of loneliness, but the cellular mechanisms by which loneliness causes adverse health outcomes have not been well understood. Now a team of researchers, including UChicago psychologist and leading loneliness expert John Cacioppo, has released a study shedding new light on how loneliness triggers physiological responses that can ultimately make us sick.

Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute scientists have reported measurements of dopamine release with unprecedented temporal precision in the brains of people with Parkinson's disease. The measurements, collected during brain surgery as the conscious patients played an investment game, demonstrate how rapid dopamine release encodes information crucial for human choice.

The findings may have widespread implications not just for Parkinson's disease, but for other neurological and psychiatric disorders as well, including depression and addiction.

A new study that surveyed Trauma Medical Directors (TMD's) at 245 trauma centers has found that damage control resuscitation (DCR) practices that originated in military settings have been widely adapted in civilian practices across the United States. The study, "Military to civilian translation of surgical battlefield innovations in surgical trauma care," is published in the December issue of Surgery.

When a blunt-force blow injures the spinal cord, the body's immune system can be both friend and foe. Sensing the injury, the immune system dispatches an inflammatory response composed of specialized cells called macrophages to dispose of dead tissue. However, together with the debris and blood from the initial injury, the macrophages also clear away healthy tissue, resulting in a larger lesion size at the injury site and additional spinal cord injury loss of function.

Using the substance bumetanide in newborn mice, the scientists succeeded in attenuating the disease progression, allowing the animals to develop almost normally. These research results could pave the way for the development of new therapeutic strategies in humans.

A new study from the Violence Prevention Initiative at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) suggests that educators, particularly in urban schools, should teach elementary school-aged girls problem-solving skills and provide them leadership opportunities as a way to reduce their relational aggression. Relational aggression includes using gossip and social exclusion to harm others, which is the most common form of aggression among girls.

PHILADELPHIA--Physicians and others now recognize that seemingly mild, concussion-type head injuries lead to long-term cognitive impairments surprisingly often. A brain protein called SNTF, which rises in the blood after some concussions, signals the type of brain damage that is thought to be the source of these cognitive impairments, according to a study led by researchers from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK.

Researchers from the University of Bristol have gained a new insight into how the circadian clock responds to changes in temperature.

With collaborators from University College London, the University of Lausanne, and the University of Cambridge, the researchers discovered that a protein called Ionotropic Receptor 25a (IR25a), an evolutionary relative of Ionotropic Glutamate Receptors have a key role in entraining the brains of fruit flies to react to small changes in temperature.

Their findings were recently published in the journal Nature.

Lincoln, Neb., Nov. 23, 2015 -- Stimulant medications for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) cause sleep problems among the children who take them, a new study from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln concludes.

The study addresses decades of conflicting opinions and evidence about the medications' effect on sleep.

In what's known as a "meta-analysis," researchers from the UNL Department of Psychology combined and analyzed the results from past studies of how ADHD medications affect sleep.

AUGUSTA, Ga. - When a high-fat diet causes us to become obese, it also appears to prompt normally bustling immune cells in our brain to become sedentary and start consuming the connections between our neurons, scientists say.

The good news is going back on a low-fat diet for just two months, at least in mice, reverses this trend of shrinking cognitive ability as weight begins to normalize, said Dr. Alexis M. Stranahan, neuroscientist in the Department of Neuroscience and Regenerative Medicine at the Medical College of Georgia.

People who show compulsive sexual behaviour, commonly referred to as sex addiction, are driven to search more for new sexual images than their peers, according to new research led by the University of Cambridge. The findings may be particularly relevant in the context of online pornography, which potentially provides an almost endless source of new images.

In a study published in the Journal of Psychiatric Research, researchers also report that sex addicts are more susceptible to environment 'cues' linked to sexual images than to those linked to neutral images.