Brain

CHICAGO – People who eat baked or broiled fish on a weekly basis may be improving their brain health and reducing their risk of developing mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and Alzheimer's disease, according to a study presented today at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA).

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) who attend regular education classes may be more likely to improve their social skills if their typically developing peers are taught how to interact with them than if only the children with ASD are taught such skills. According to a study funded by the National Institutes of Health, a shift away from more commonly used interventions that focus on training children with ASD directly may provide greater social benefits for children with ASD. The study was published online ahead of print on Nov.

LEXINGTON, Ky. -- A University of Kentucky faculty member is a contributing author on a new study demonstrating a connection between a common solvent chemical and Parkinson's disease. Dr. Franca Cambi of the UK Kentucky Neuroscience Institute collaborated with researchers from across the U.S. on a paper recently published in the Annals of Neurology. The novel study looked at a cohort of human twins wherein one twin had been occupationally exposed to trichloroethylene (TCE) and other chemicals believed to be linked to development of Parkinson's.

UPTON, NY — The more gray matter you have in the decision-making, thought-processing part of your brain, the better your ability to evaluate rewards and consequences. That may seem like an obvious conclusion, but a new study conducted at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory is the first to show this link between structure and function in healthy people — and the impairment of both structure and function in people addicted to cocaine. The study appears in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

In a scientific first that potentially could shed new light on how signals travel in the brain, how learning alters neural pathways, and might lead to speedier drug development, scientists at Harvard have created genetically-altered neurons that light up as they fire.

In order to better counsel patients, it is key for clinicians of different disciplines to be aware of, and diagnose, the 'overlap syndrome' between two medical disorders - ALS and FTD - since it significantly affects patient survival. In her new study¹, Catherine Lomen-Hoerth, from the University of California San Francisco in the US, also highlights that from a research perspective, identifying the syndrome early is an opportunity to study damaged nerve cells and understand more about the early stages of both ALS and FTD.

Stress-related disorders are often linked to people working in the line of fire. In a study led by researchers at NYU Langone Medical Center in collaboration with the San Francisco VA Medical Center and the University of California, San Francisco, police recruits were assessed during academy training before critical incident exposure and provided salivary cortisol at first awakening and after 30 minutes.

Bethesda, Md. (Nov. 28, 2011)—The perceptual feature of sound known as pitch is fundamental to human hearing, allowing us to enjoy the melodies and harmonies of music and recognize the inflection of speech. Previous studies have suggested that a particular hotspot in the brain might be responsible for perceiving pitch. However, auditory neuroscientists are still hotly debating whether this "pitch center" actually exists.

A team of researchers from the Johns Hopkins Children's Center, Vanderbilt University and elsewhere have demonstrated that high blood pressure and anemia together put children with sickle cell disease (SCD) at serious danger for symptomless or so-called "silent" strokes, although either condition alone also signaled high risk.

The results are part of an ongoing NIH-funded international multicenter trial, believed to be the largest study of its kind to date in children with SCD. A report on the findings is published online Nov. 17 in the journal Blood.

A healthy diet and the right amount of exercise are key players in treating and preventing obesity but we still know little about the relationship both factors have with each other. A new study now reveals that an increase in physical activity is linked to an improvement in diet quality.

Many questions arise when trying to lose weight. Would it be better to start on a diet and then do exercise, or the other way around? And how much does one compensate the other?

Babies as young as eight months old prefer it when people who commit or condone antisocial acts are mistreated, a new study led by a University of British Columbia psychologist finds.

While previous research shows that babies uniformly prefer kind acts, the new study published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that eight month-old infants support negative behavior if it is directed at those who act antisocially – and dislike those who are nice to bad guys.

CHICAGO – Using diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) to study the effects of soccer 'heading,' researchers have found that players who head the ball with high frequency have brain abnormalities similar to those found in traumatic brain injury (TBI) patients. Results of their study were presented today at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA).

Heading, in which players field the soccer ball with their head, is an essential part of the game and the focus of many training drills.

November 29, 2011 – (BRONX, NY) – Using advanced imaging techniques and cognitive tests, researchers at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University and Montefiore Medical Center , the University Hospital and academic medical center for Einstein, have shown that repeatedly heading a soccer ball increases the risk for brain injury and cognitive impairment.

As we get older, our cognitive abilities change, improving when we're younger and declining as we age. Scientists posit a hierarchical structure within which these abilities are organized. There's the "lowest" level -- measured by specific tests, such as story memory or word memory; the second level, which groups various skills involved in a category of cognitive ability, such as memory, perceptual speed, or reasoning; and finally, the "general," or G, factor, a sort of statistical aggregate of all the thinking abilities.

While it has long been recognized that certain areas in the brain's left hemisphere enable us to understand and produce language, scientists are still figuring out exactly how those areas divvy up the highly complex processes necessary to comprehend and produce language.

Advances in brain imaging made within the last 10 years have revealed that highly complex cognitive tasks such as language processing rely not only on particular regions of the cerebral cortex, but also on the white matter fiber pathways that connect them.