Brain

Immigrants to the United States and their U.S.-born children gain more than a new life and new citizenship. They gain weight. The wide availability of cheap, convenient, fatty American foods and large meal portions have been blamed for immigrants packing on pounds, approaching U.S. levels of obesity within 15 years of their move.

Philadelphia, PA – 3 May 2011 – Developmental abnormalities in the mirror neuron system may contribute to social deficits in autism.

The mirror neuron system is a brain circuit that enables us to better understand and anticipate the actions of others. These circuits activate in similar ways when we perform actions or watch other people perform the same actions.

Now, a new study published in Biological Psychiatry reports that the mirror system in individuals with autism is not actually broken, but simply delayed.

A pianist is playing an unknown melody freely without reading from a musical score. How does the listener's brain recognise if this melody is improvised or if it is memorized? Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig investigated jazz musicians to discover which brain areas are especially sensitive to features of improvised behaviour. Among these are the amygdala and a network of areas known to be involved in the mental simulation of behaviour.

CHICAGO --- People take billions of doses of over-the-counter pain relievers like Tylenol every year, but many do not pay attention to the active ingredients they contain, such as acetaminophen, according to a new Northwestern Medicine study. That lack of knowledge about popular pain relievers plus particular ignorance of acetaminophen's presence in more than 600 over-the-counter and prescription medicines could be a key reason acetaminophen overdose has become the leading cause of acute liver failure in the U.S.

Exposure to secondhand smoke, such as a person can get by riding in an enclosed car while someone else smokes, has a direct, measurable impact on the brain—and the effect is similar to what happens in the brain of the person doing the smoking. In fact, exposure to this secondhand smoke evokes cravings among smokers, according to a study funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), part of the National Institutes of Health.

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. – In 2005, researchers from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill found that 2-year-old children with autism have brains up to 10 percent larger than children of the same age without autism.

Scientists using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) observed that the brains of children with autism spectrum disorder are larger than those without autism, but this difference appears related to increased rates of brain growth before 2 years of age, according to a report in the May issue of Archives of General Psychiatry, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.

In England, the prevalence of adults with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) was estimated to be 9.8 per 1,000 population, according to a report in the May issue of Archives of General Psychiatry, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.

Military service members who screened positive for mental health disorders before deployment, or who were injured during deployment, were more likely to develop post-deployment posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms than their colleagues without these risk factors, according to a report in the May issue of Archives of General Psychiatry, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.

People who look at the past through rose-tinted glasses are happier than those who focus on negative past experiences and regrets, according to a new study published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences. The study helps explain why personality has such a strong influence on a person's happiness. The findings suggest that persons with certain personality traits are happier than others because of the way they think about their past, present and future.

DENVER, CO – Doctors have long sought a way to directly measure the brain's temperature without inserting a probe through the skull. Now researchers have developed a way to get the brain's precise temperature with a device the diameter of a poker-chip that rests on a patient's head, according to findings presented May 1 at the annual meeting of the Pediatric Academic Societies in Denver.

A new protein, called aquaporin-4, is making waves and found to play a key role in brain inflammation, or encephalitis. This discovery is important as the first to identify a role for this protein in inflammation, opening doors for the development of new drugs that treat brain inflammation and other conditions at the cellular level rather than just treating the symptoms. This discovery was published in the May 2011 issue of The FASEB Journal (http://www.faseb.org).

TEMPE, Ariz. – The public favors equal custody for children of divorce, according to findings in a pair of studies by Arizona State University researchers that will appear in the May 2011 journal Psychology, Public Policy, and Law.

DENVER, CO – Doctors have long sought a way to directly measure the brain's temperature without inserting a probe through the skull. Now researchers have developed a way to get the brain's precise temperature with a device the diameter of a poker-chip that rests on a patient's head, according to findings presented May 1 at the annual meeting of the Pediatric Academic Societies in Denver.

Higher levels of cell chatter boost amyloid beta in the brain regions that Alzheimer's hits first, researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis report. Amyloid beta is the main ingredient of the plaque lesions that are a hallmark of Alzheimer's.