Brain

WASHINGTON - The demand for family caregivers for adults who are 65 or older is increasing significantly, and family caregivers need more recognition, information, and support to fulfill their responsibilities and maintain their own health, financial security, and well-being, says a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Although caregivers' individual circumstances vary, family caregiving can negatively affect caregivers' mental and physical health as well cause economic harm, including loss of income and career opportunities.

• Alzheimer's may also affect language, behavior or spatial judgment
• These patients often are not given an opportunity to be in Alzheimer's clinical trials
• Amyloid PET scan offers way to identify underlying disease and have more inclusive clinical trials

CHICAGO --- Relying on clinical symptoms of memory loss to diagnose Alzheimer's disease may miss other forms of dementia caused by Alzheimer's that don't initially affect memory, reports a new Northwestern Medicine study.

Entitlement--a personality trait driven by exaggerated feelings of deservingness and superiority--may lead to chronic disappointment, unmet expectations and a habitual, self-reinforcing cycle of behavior with dire psychological and social costs, according to new research by Case Western Reserve University.

In a new theoretical model, researchers have mapped how entitled personality traits may lead to a perpetual loop of distress, in a literature review published in the Psychological Bulletin.

VIDEO: How to weed out bad information online and tips on preventing Alzheimer's disease.

New UBC research finds that many online resources for preventing Alzheimer's disease are problematic and could be steering people in the wrong direction.

In a survey of online articles about preventing Alzheimer's disease, UBC researchers found many websites offered poor advice and one in five promoted products for sale--a clear conflict of interest.

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- Research from Indiana University has found that structured block-building games improve spatial abilities in children to a greater degree than board games.

The study, which appears in the journal Frontiers in Psychology, measured the relative impact of two games -- a structured block-building game and a word-spelling board game -- on children's spatial processing, including mental rotation, which involves visualizing what an object will look like after it is rotated.

How the brain responds to nicotine depends on a smoker's belief about the nicotine content in a cigarette, according to new research from the Center for BrainHealth at The University of Texas at Dallas.

Craving relief may depend more on the belief of satisfaction than actual relief, according to scientists at the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute and the Center for BrainHealth at The University of Texas at Dallas.

Researchers at the University of Adelaide say they may have discovered a new target in the fight against depression: a faulty gene that is linked to cardiovascular and metabolic conditions.

A heathy diet is linked to better reading skills in the first three school years, shows a recent study from Finland. Published in the European Journal of Nutrition, the study constitutes part of the Physical Activity and Nutrition in Children Study conducted at the University of Eastern Finland and the First Steps Study conducted at the University of Jyväskylä.

It does not take an infinite number of monkeys to type a passage of Shakespeare. Instead, it takes a single monkey equipped with brain-sensing technology - and a cheat sheet.

That technology, developed by Stanford Bio-X scientists Krishna Shenoy, a professor of electrical engineering at Stanford, and postdoctoral fellow Paul Nuyujukian, directly reads brain signals to drive a cursor moving over a keyboard. In an experiment conducted with monkeys, the animals were able to transcribe passages from the New York Times and Hamlet at a rate of up to 12 words per minute.

Glioblastomas exert an influence on the microglia, immune cells of the brain, which causes them to stimulate cancer growth rather than attacking it. In a study published in the journal Nature Immunology, an international research team led from Sweden's Karolinska Institutet now explains the molecular mechanisms behind this action.

Boston, Mass. -- Researchers from Massachusetts Eye and Ear have, for the first time, linked symptoms of difficulty understanding speech in noisy environments with evidence of cochlear synaptopathy, a condition known as "hidden hearing loss," in college-age human subjects with normal hearing sensitivity.

For the first time, abnormal brain development following a Zika infection during pregnancy has been documented experimentally in the offspring of a non-human primate.

The researchers' observations of how Zika virus arrested fetal brain formation in a pigtail macaque could provide a model for testing therapeutic interventions.

The findings are reported Sept. 12 in the advanced online publication of Nature Medicine.

LA JOLLA--Our brains contain a surprising diversity of DNA. Even though we are taught that every cell in our body has the same DNA, in fact most cells in the brain have changes to their DNA that make each neuron a little different.

Professor Byung-Chang Suh's research team from the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences succeeded in identifying a new operational mechanism principle of the 'Acid-sensing Ion Channel,' which recognizes internal pain in an organism.

The findings are expected to have a significant impact on further studies focusing on the development of therapeutic agents that control pain by providing a more precise understanding of the operational mechanism of the 'Acid-sensing Ion Channel' that plays a pivotal role in transmitting pain signals.