Brain

Learning how to look inside a body without having to cut it open is still an important part of medical research. One of the great challenges in imaging remains the visualization of oxygen in tissue. A team led by Prof. Vasilis Ntziachristos, Chair for Biological Imaging at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) and Director of the Institute for Biological and Medical Imaging at the Helmholtz Zentrum München , has developed a new approach to this task.

PHILADELPHIA -- Researchers are closer to finding a better way to treat children with a rare metabolic disorder called MPS I. It is caused by a deficiency of the key enzyme IDUA needed to break down complex sugars in cells. MPS I eventually leads to the abnormal accumulation of sugar debris and cell death. The two main treatments are bone marrow transplantation and intravenous enzyme replacement therapy; however, both are only marginally effective or clinically impractical, especially when the disease enters the central nervous system (CNS).

Thinking about the future helps overcome relationship conflicts, according to a University of Waterloo study just published online in Social Psychological and Personality Science.

NEW YORK, NY, July 28, 2016 - Researchers from Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC) and New York State Psychiatric Institute (NYSPI) have found that legislation reducing access to firearms has lowered firearm suicide rates in other countries. This finding is based on evidence from around the world on the relationship between firearm ownership and firearm suicide rates.

The report was published recently in the American Journal of Psychiatry.

For more than a century, neuroscientists have known that nerve cells talk to one another across the small gaps between them, a process known as synaptic transmission (synapses are the connections between neurons). Information is carried from one cell to the other by neurotransmitters such as glutamate, dopamine, and serotonin, which activate receptors on the receiving neuron to convey excitatory or inhibitory messages.

COLUMBIA, Mo. - An estimated 50,000 American adolescents with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) will turn 18 each year. Past research has indicated that the transition from school to adulthood presents significant challenges to youth with ASD, however, gathering firsthand accounts of these challenges has been limited due to youth's limited participation in research.

Humans rely on boundaries like walls and curbs for navigation, and Johns Hopkins University researchers have pinpointed the areas of the brain most sensitive to even the tiniest borders.

New measurements may have lifted the veil on the vexingly elusive interactions through which lithium can moderate the manic highs and debilitating lows experienced by people who suffer from bipolar disorder--about 2.6 percent of Americans, according to the National Institute of Mental Health.

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (July 27, 2016)--Clues that point toward new risk mechanisms for developing Parkinson's disease are hiding in some unusual spots, according to a study published today in Scientific Reports.

Ever taken a selfie? Around the world, people snap tens of millions of these self-portraits every day, usually with a mobile device held at arm's length. For all their raging popularity, though, selfies can often be misrepresentative, even unflattering. Due to the camera's proximity, selfies render subjects' noses larger, ears smaller and foreheads more sloping.

Your eyelids are getting heavy, your arms are going limp and you feel like you're floating through space. The power of hypnosis to alter your mind and body like this is all thanks to changes in a few specific areas of the brain, researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have discovered.

Brief, directed smartphone exercises can help quickly improve our mood. This is the latest finding from psychologists at the University of Basel and their international colleagues, reported in the journal Frontiers in Psychology.

Participants in the international study felt more alert, calmer and uplifted after - using five-minute video tutorials on their smartphones as a guide - they had, for example, practiced concentrating on their bodies.

Philadelphia, PA, July 28, 2016 - A new study in Biological Psychiatry reports that smoking-related deficits in brain dopamine, a chemical implicated in reward and addiction, return to normal three months after quitting. The normalization of dopamine systems suggests smoking-related deficits are a consequence of chronic smoking, rather than a risk factor. These findings raise the possibility that treatments might be developed that normalize the dopamine system in smokers.

A natural substance known to activate pain in the central nervous system has been found to have the opposite effect in other parts of the body, potentially paving the way to new methods of pain control.

The discovery could explain the repeated - and costly - failure over the last 20 years of clinical trials of potential pain-killing drugs that targeted the substance, known as 'Substance P'.

BOSTON -- A new study presented at the Society of NeuroInterventional Surgery's (SNIS) 13th Annual Meeting in Boston found that the Opercular Score Index (OIS) is a practical, noninvasive scoring system that can be used to predict the strength and health of the vascular network in the brain (known as collateral robustness) and good clinical outcome among stroke patients undergoing endovascular recanalization.