Brain

Adolescents who misuse alcohol and other drugs to the point where they need treatment must contend with costly and limited options for youth-specific care, as well as high relapse rates following treatment. Mutual-help groups such as Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) and Narcotics Anonymous (NA) are widely available but little research has addressed their benefits for adolescents. An assessment of 12-step meetings and recommended activities has found that attendance, participation, and finding a sponsor promote greater abstinence among adolescents.

Drinking during adolescence has both short- and long-term negative health consequences. Prior research has shown that peer influence is one of the most important predictors of alcohol use in adolescence. This study used a high-school chat session to examine peer influence on adolescent drinking, finding that anti-alcohol norms seemed more influential than pro-alcohol norms, and that adolescents were more influenced by their high-status than low-status peers.

• Alcoholism can disrupt memory functioning prior to later-stage Korsakoff's syndrome.
• A new study has examined associative memory, used in remembering face-name associations, in alcoholics.
• Findings indicate that impaired learning abilities are predominantly associated with cerebellar brain volumes.

NEW ORLEANS – An investigational oral drug called ONO-4641 reduced the number of lesions in people with multiple sclerosis (MS), according to the results of a phase two clinical trial to be presented as Emerging Science (formerly known as Late-Breaking Science) at the American Academy of Neurology's 64th Annual Meeting in New Orleans April 21 to April 28, 2012.

A large-scale, long-term UT Dallas study focusing on adolescent friendships and electronic communication is expanding to include Facebook posts.

A research team led by Dr. Marion Underwood of The University of Texas at Dallas will capture and code the content of adolescent activity on Facebook, the most popular social networking website. The new research is supported by a more than $408,000, two-year grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The NIH earlier funded Underwood's study of teen texts, e-mails and instant messages with a $3.4 million grant.

WINSTON-SALEM, N.C., – April 16, 2012– Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center researchers seeking a successful treatment for traumatic brain injury have found that the size and extent of damaged tissue can be reduced by using a new device to prevent cell death.

The research, the focus of a three-year, $1.5 million study funded by the Department of Defense, was recently published in the journal Neurosurgery. The technology, tested in rats, is called mechanical tissue resuscitation (MTR) and uses negative pressure to create an environment that fosters cell survival.

Amsterdam, NL, 16 April 2012 – Dementia is a frequent complication of Parkinson's disease (PD), but it is clinically impossible to distinguish PD dementia (PDD), which develops from the progression of the Lewy body pathology that underlies PD, from PD with coexistent Alzheimer's disease (PDAD). Both have similar characteristics. A team of scientists has found that PDAD patients have much denser accumulations of amyloid plaques in the striatal area of the brain than PDD patients.

AURORA, Colo. (April 16, 2012) – Researchers at the University of Colorado School of Medicine have found that lack of a specific gene interrupts neural tube closure, a condition that can cause death or paralysis.

Like snow sliding off a roof on a sunny day, the Greenland Ice Sheet may be sliding faster into the ocean due to massive releases of meltwater from surface lakes, according to a new study by the University of Colorado Boulder-based Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences.

Injection of a small amount of clumped protein triggers a cascade of events leading to a Parkinson's-like disease in mice, according to an article published online this week in the Journal of Experimental Medicine.

Progressive accumulation of clumps of the protein alpha-synuclein in the brains of patients with Parkinson's disease coincides with the onset of motor dysfunction. However, whether these clumps are sufficient to trigger neurodegeneration, and how these clumps spread throughout the brain, remained unclear.

Catastrophic brain injuries associated with full-contact football appear to be rising, especially among high school students, according to a new report.

The increase is alarming and indicates more coaches and athletic trainers should change how they teach the fundamental skills of the game, according to researchers based at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

December 2011: Security forces intercept a letter bomb addressed to Josef Ackermann, the head of Deutsche Bank. At almost the same moment, a letter bomb explodes in an office in Rome. The hand of the manager in charge of Equitalia, the tax-collection authority, was injured. Until now, police officers or security staff have had to conduct painstaking inspections of any suspicious parcels and letters by hand - an error-prone approach. At the end of 2011, though, the scanner T-Cognition 1.0 from Hübner company of Kassel, Germany, went on the market.

Shrinkage of the hippocampus occurs with age and is caused by the cumulative effect of various factors. Hippocampal atrophy is a recognized biological marker of Alzheimer's disease, so it is vital that researchers determine the cause of this process.

A University of British Columbia researcher has developed a simple two-question test to screen kindergarten-aged children for future anxiety disorders - the most commonly reported mental health concern among children.

The screening questions, which ask parents about shyness, anxiety and worrying in their children, were found to be 85 per cent effective in identifying children who went on to be clinically diagnosed with an anxiety disorder.

A network of brain regions which is activated during intense aesthetic experience overlaps with the brain network associated with inward contemplation and self-assessment, New York University researchers have found. Their study sheds new light on the nature of the aesthetic experience, which appears to integrate sensory and emotional reactions in a manner linked with their personal relevance.