Brain

After excessively violent events, shoot 'em up games regularly come under scrutiny. In Norway, several first-person shooter games actually disappeared from the market for a while after the killings. Does intense fighting on a flat screen display also result in aggressive behavior in real life? Researchers from the University of Bonn found brain activity patterns in heavy gamers that differed from those of non-gamers. The study's results have just been published in the scientific journal Biological Psychology.

WASHINGTON, Oct. 12—"It's not brain surgery" is a phrase often uttered to dismiss a job's difficulty, but when the task actually is removing a brain tumor, even the slightest mistake could have serious health consequences. To help surgeons in such high-pressure situations, researchers from Prof. Adam Wax's team at Duke University's Fitzpatrick Institute for Photonics and Biomedical Engineering Department have proposed a way to harness the unique optical properties of gold nanoparticles to clearly distinguish a brain tumor from the healthy, and vital, tissue that surrounds it.

In an advance toward eliminating pockets of infection in the brain that help make HIV disease incurable, scientists report the development of new substances that first plug the biological vacuum cleaner that prevents anti-HIV drugs from reaching the brain and then revert to an active drug to treat HIV. They describe the advance, which allows medications to cross the so-called "blood-brain barrier" (BBB) and treat brain diseases, in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

PITTSBURGH, Oct. 11 -- Melatonin, best known for its role in sleep regulation, delayed the onset of symptoms and reduced mortality in a mouse model of Huntington's disease, say researchers at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and Harvard Medical School. Their findings, published today in the Journal of Neuroscience, show for the first time that certain receptors for the hormone reside in the mitochondria, and that there are fewer of them both in affected mice and human brains.

CINCINNATI—An analysis by University of Cincinnati (UC) faculty members shows that a multiple-choice testing program coupled with a novel year-long clinical experience helps internal medicine residents improve their scores on the Internal Medicine In-Training Exam (IM-ITE).

Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 11 October 2011 – Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a common problem that is becoming progressively burdensome throughout the world. A new supplement to the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease, Imaging the Alzheimer Brain, clearly shows that multiple imaging systems are now available to help understand, diagnose, and treat the disease.

Although exercise is often prescribed as a treatment for migraine, there has not previously been sufficient scientific evidence that it really works. However, research from the Sahlgrenska Academy at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, has now shown that exercise is just as good as drugs at preventing migraines.

Doctors use a variety of different methods to prevent migraines these days: on the pharmaceutical side a drug based on the substance topiramate has proved effective, while non-medical treatments with well-documented effects include relaxation exercises.

Water channels exist not only in nature – microscopical water channels are also present in the cells of the body, where they ensure that water can be transported through the protective surface of the cell. Scientists at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, have discovered that one type of the body's water channels can be modified such that it becomes more stable , which may be significant in the treatment of several diseases.

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- A tiny piece of a critical receptor that fuels the brain and without which sentient beings cannot live has been discovered by University at Buffalo scientists as a promising new drug target for Alzheimer's and other neurodegenerative diseases.

The research on the NMDA (N-methyl-D-aspartate) receptor is being published online Oct. 11 in Nature Communications.

Research from Aaron Kivisto, clinical psychology program graduate at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and current post-doctoral fellow at Massachusetts General Hospital; Todd Moore, assistant professor of psychology at UT; and Bruce Seidner, clinical assistant professor in the psychology clinic at UT, found that unlike adults, most children and adolescents who are found incompetent to stand trial are not psychotic; rather, they have cognitive impairments. And, they are often too immature to understand the magnitude of the situation.

CINCINNATI—Activating a specialized type of fat, known as brown adipose tissue, may help combat obesity as well as result in better glucose control for type 2 diabetes, according to new research conducted by scientists at the UC Metabolic Diseases Institute.

The current UC study suggests that activating brown adipose tissue through targeted inhibition of the cannabinoid receptor 1, also known as CB1, could effectively reduce body weight and blood glucose by increasing calorie burning in brown adipose tissue.

ROCHESTER, Minn. — Addressing the earliest stages of Alzheimer's disease, before a patient shows outward signs of cognitive problems, has sometimes been a challenge for physicians and researchers, in part because they have not been using common and specific terms to describe the disease's initial phases. A Mayo Clinic study recommends adding categories to more effectively identify and treat people and give researchers standard definitions to work with.

PASADENA, Calif.—People with autism process information in unusual ways and often have difficulties in their social interactions in everyday life. While this can be especially striking in those who are otherwise high functioning, characterizing this difficulty in detail has been challenging. Now, researchers from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have isolated a very specific difference in how high-functioning people with autism think about other people, finding that—in actuality—they don't tend to think about what others think of them at all.

MANHATTAN, Kan. -- A psychology team at Kansas State University is studying how elementary and middle school youths perceive and anticipate interacting with peers who have various characteristics seen as undesirable, such as being a poor student or being extremely aggressive.

Researchers with UCLA's Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center have developed and used a high-throughput molecular screening approach that identifies and characterizes chemical compounds that can target the stem cells that are responsible for creating deadly brain tumors.

Glioblastoma is one of the deadliest malignancies, typically killing patients within 12 to 18 months. These brain cancers consist of two kinds of cells, a larger, heterogeneous population of tumor cells and a smaller sub-population of stem cells, which are treatment-resistant.