Brain

Overall, roughly half of U.S. children taken to hospital emergency departments (EDs) for a head injury receive a head CT scan, often to ease worried parents' concerns. Yet true traumatic brain injury is uncommon. A multi-center study of more than 40,000 children with minor blunt head trauma, led by Children's Hospital Boston and UC Davis, shows that allowing a period of observation can reduce the use of head CT by as much as half without compromising care – and without exposing children to ionizing radiation.

New Haven, Conn. —Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) in South Korea affect an estimated 2.64% of the population of school-age children, equivalent to 1 in 38 children, according to the first comprehensive study of autism prevalence using a total population sample. The study—conducted by Young-Shin Kim, M.D., of the Yale Child Study Center and her colleagues in the U.S., Korea and Canada—identifies children not yet diagnosed and has the potential to increase autism spectrum disorder prevalence estimates worldwide.

New York, N.Y. (May 9, 2011) – In the first comprehensive study of autism prevalence using a total population sample, an international team of investigators from the U.S., South Korea, and Canada estimated the prevalence of autism spectrum disorders (ASD) in South Korea to be 2.64%, or approximately 1 in 38 children, and concluded that autism prevalence estimates worldwide may increase when this approach is used to identify children with ASD.

HOUSTON -- (May 9, 2011) – In the wild, mammals survive because they can see and evade predators lurking in the shadowy bushes.

That ability translates to the human world. Transportation Security Administration screeners can pick out dangerous objects in an image of our messy and stuffed suitcases. We get out of the house every morning because we find our car keys on that cluttered shelf next to the door.

This ability to recognize target objects surrounded by distracters is one of the remarkable functions of our nervous system.

NEW YORK – Green roofs like the one atop a Con Edison building in Long Island City, Queens can be a cost-effective way to keep water from running into sewer systems and causing overflows, Columbia University researchers have found.

The Con Edison Green Roof, which is home to 21,000 plants on a quarter acre of The Learning Center, retains 30 percent of the rainwater that falls on it. The plants then release the water as vapor, the researchers said in the study (http://www.coned.com/greenroofcolumbia).

It is an article of faith among many critics of public schools that there is no correlation between spending and learning outcomes. But it's not so—at least where library spending is concerned.

When support for school libraries rises, reading scores go up and learning by other measures increases also. That's what researchers at Mansfield University in Mansfield, PA found when they examined and summarized the results of 23 studies done around the United States and Canada.

Edmonton – Researchers with the Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry at the University of Alberta have discovered that some "protective" T-cells can kill neurons. This finding is significant because a specific type of T-cell therapy is being touted in the medical community as a potential treatment for MS and other autoimmune conditions.

Dr. Fabrizio Giuliani and his post-doctoral fellow, Yohannes Haile, both from the Division of Neurology, collaborated on this research which was recently published in the Journal of Leukocyte Biology, a peer-reviewed medical journal.

Clinicians, researchers and scientists from around the world will gather for Digestive Disease Week® (DDW) 2011, the largest and most prestigious gastroenterology meeting, from May 7-10, 2011, at McCormick Place, Chicago, IL. DDW, which is jointly sponsored by the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases, the American Gastroenterological Association (AGA) Institute, the American Society for Gastrointestinal Endoscopy and the Society for Surgery of the Alimentary Tract, is the annual meeting of the AGA Institute.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — Sleeping worms have much to teach people, a notion famously applied by the children's show "Sesame Street," in which Oscar the Grouch often reads bedtime stories to his pet worm Slimy. Based on research with their own worms, a team of neurobiologists at Brown University and several other institutions has now found that "Notch," a fundamental signaling pathway found in all animals, is directly involved in sleep in the nematode C. elegans.

LA JOLLA, Calif., May 5, 2011 – Early in embryonic development, the neural crest – a transient group of stem cells – gives rise to parts of the nervous system and several other tissues. But little is known about what determines which cells become neurons and which become other cell types. A team led by Dr. Alexey Terskikh at Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute (Sanford-Burnham) recently found that expression of a gene called SOX2 maintains the potential for neural crest stem cells to become neurons in the peripheral nervous system, where they interface with muscles and other organs.

Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y. – A new study from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) offers an explanation for why our brains produce fewer and fewer neurons with age, a phenomenon thought to underlie age-related cognitive decline. The study, published as the cover story in the May 6 issue of Cell Stem Cell, suggests that this drop in production is due to the shrinking cache of adult stem cells in our brains.

A protein that helps the brain develop early in life can fight the mental fuzziness induced by sleep deprivation, according to researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

Scientists from the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute and the University of Melbourne have used innovative new technologies to identify the gene responsible for a rare but fatal hereditary brain disorder. The discovery will make it possible to diagnose the disease through a blood test rather than a brain biopsy.

AUSTIN, Texas—Computer networks that can't forget fast enough can show symptoms of a kind of virtual schizophrenia, giving researchers further clues to the inner workings of schizophrenic brains, researchers at The University of Texas at Austin and Yale University have found.

The researchers used a virtual computer model, or "neural network," to simulate the excessive release of dopamine in the brain. They found that the network recalled memories in a distinctly schizophrenic-like fashion.

Their results were published in April in Biological Psychiatry.

May 5, 2011 – (BRONX, NY) – There are no effective treatments for rhabdoid tumors – aggressive childhood cancers that usually strike children under three years old and affect the brain or kidneys. The disease is extremely rare – fewer than 10 cases are diagnosed each year in the U.S. – but is particularly difficult to treat and almost always fatal.