Brain

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. - University of Alabama at Birmingham researchers report the first documentation that suppressing a key cell-signaling pathway in a rat model of Parkinson's disease reduces pathogenesis. Oral administration of AZD1480 -- one of the JAK/STAT pathway inhibitors generally known as Jakinibs -- lessened the destructive inflammation and nerve cell degradation in the area of the brain affected by Parkinson's.

NEW YORK, NY (May 3, 2016)--Adults with bipolar disorder are just as likely to develop anxiety as depression following an episode of mania, according to data from a national survey of more than 34,000 adults. This finding, published today in Molecular Psychiatry, may expand our understanding of bipolar disorder to include anxiety.

Philadelphia, PA, May 3, 2016 - A new study in the current issue of Biological Psychiatry suggests that women are particularly susceptible to the pain-relieving placebo effect of vasopressin.

Placebos are used to help accurately measure clinical responses/outcomes when studying the effects of medications, therapies, and other treatments. The well-known "placebo effect" is a phenomenon whereby a patient's condition improves or a patient experiences side effects despite having received a "fake" treatment.

The Cochrane Infectious Diseases Group (CIDG) have carried out a review update to evaluate the effects of corticosteroids being used alongside anti-tuberculosis medication to treat people suffering from tuberculous meningitis.

Tuberculous meningitis is a serious form of tuberculosis (TB), which affects the membranes that cover the brain and spinal cord. The infection causes headache, coma, and death is common. Survivors are also at risk of being disabled from brain damage.

A large cross-sectional study focused on women with migraines with aura and compared their brain MRI images with those of women not suffering from migraine. No differences between these two groups of women were found with regard to number of silent infarcts* and white matter hyperintensities (WMH). The findings were published today in Brain.

Aging takes its toll on the brain, and the cells of the hippocampus--a brain region with circuitry crucial to learning and memory--are particularly vulnerable to changes that can lead to Alzheimer's disease or cognitive decline. With the hope of counteracting the changes that can lead to these two conditions, researchers at Rockefeller University and their colleagues have begun examining the effects of a drug known to affect this circuitry.

In the late 1980s and over the 1990s, researchers at Lund University in Sweden pioneered the transplantation of new nerve cells into the brains of patients with Parkinson's disease. The outcomes proved for the first time that transplanted nerve cells can survive and function in the diseased human brain. Some patients showed marked improvement after the transplantation while others showed moderate or no relief of symptoms. A small number of patients suffered unwanted side-effects in the form of involuntary movements.

Medical error is the third leading cause of death in the US after heart disease and cancer, say experts in The BMJ today.

Martin Makary and Michael Daniel at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore say death certificates in the US have no facility for acknowledging medical error, and they call for better reporting to help understand the scale of the problem and how to tackle it.

What's that old saying about Mussolini? Say what you will but he made the trains run on time. Well, the suprachiasmatic nucleus -- SCN for short -- makes everything in the body run on time. The SCN is the control center for our internal genetic clock, the circadian rhythms which regulate everything from sleep to hunger, insulin sensitivity, hormone levels, body temperature, cell cycles and more.

The SCN has been studied extensively but the underlying structure of its neural network has remained a mystery.

LA JOLLA -- (May 02, 2016) When tweaking its architecture, the adult brain works like a sculptor -- starting with more than it needs so it can carve away the excess to achieve the perfect design. That's the conclusion of a new study that tracked developing cells in an adult mouse brain in real time.

The stereotypes we hold can influence our brain's visual system, prompting us to see others' faces in ways that conform to these stereotypes, neuroscientists at New York University have found.

"Our findings provide evidence that the stereotypes we hold can systematically alter the brain's visual representation of a face, distorting what we see to be more in line with our biased expectations," explains Jonathan Freeman, an assistant professor in NYU's Department of Psychology and the senior author of the paper, which appears in the journal Nature Neuroscience.

The cannabinoid type 2 receptor - also called "CB2 receptor" - is a special membrane protein. Its function is to receive chemical signals that control cellular activity. "Until now, this receptor was considered part of the immune system without function in nerve cells. However, our study shows that it also plays an important role in the signal processing of the brain," explains Professor Dietmar Schmitz, Speaker for the DZNE-Site Berlin and Director of the Neuroscience Research Center of the Charité (NWFZ/NeuroCure).

Brooklyn, NY - Research led by SUNY Downstate Medical Center has identified a brain receptor that appears to initiate adolescent synaptic pruning, a process believed necessary for learning, but one that appears to go awry in both autism and schizophrenia.

May 2, 2016 - Buprenorphine is a critical part of treatment for the growing epidemic of opioid abuse--but also carries the potential for misuse and diversion. The debate over whether 'to expand or not to expand' prescribing of buprenorphine for opioid abuse is discussed in an expert review in the Journal of Psychiatric Practice, published by Wolters Kluwer.

Small changes in the social lives of older people are early red flags showing that their thought processes and brain functioning could be on the decline. This is according to Ashwin Kotwal of Brigham and Women's Hospital in the US, who led a study¹ in the Journal of General Internal Medicine², published by Springer.