Brain

Washington, DC — Stimulating a region of the brain known to be involved in reward decreases binge eating behavior in mice, according to a study published in the April 24 issue of The Journal of Neuroscience. The findings add to a growing body of evidence supporting the role of the brain’s reward system in driving the consumption of palatable food. It could one day pave the way for more effective and lasting treatments for obesity.

BOSTON (April 24, 2013) – Neurodegenerative and central nervous system (CNS) diseases represent a major public health issue affecting at least 20 million children and adults in the United States alone. Multiple drugs exist to treat and potentially cure these debilitating diseases, but 98 percent of all potential pharmaceutical agents are prevented from reaching the CNS directly due to the blood-brain barrier.

Prisoners who are psychopaths lack the basic neurophysiological "hardwiring" that enables them to care for others, according to a new study by neuroscientists at the University of Chicago and the University of New Mexico.

ANN ARBOR—Long-term exposure to air pollution may be linked to heart attacks and strokes by speeding up atherosclerosis, or "hardening of the arteries," according to a University of Michigan public health researcher and colleagues from across the U.S.

DURHAM, N.C. – The production of a certain kind of brain cell that had been considered an impediment to healing may actually be needed to staunch bleeding and promote repair after a stroke or head trauma, researchers at Duke Medicine report.

The newly proposed scientific project to understand the most complicated 3 pounds of material in the world — the human brain — is the topic of an article in the current edition of Chemical & Engineering News, the weekly newsmagazine of the American Chemical Society, the world's largest scientific society.

PHILADELPHIA - Deep brain stimulation (DBS) in a precise region of the brain appears to reduce caloric intake and prompt weight loss in obese animal models, according to a new study led by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania. The study, reported in the Journal of Neuroscience, reinforces the involvement of dopamine deficits in increasing obesity-related behaviors such as binge eating, and demonstrates that DBS can reverse this response via activation of the dopamine type-2 receptor.

A multicenter study led by scientists at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine shows that mild traumatic brain injury after blast exposure produces inflammation, oxidative stress and gene activation patterns akin to disorders of memory processing such as Alzheimer's disease. Their findings were recently reported in the online version of the Journal of Neurotrauma.

Researcher Johan Jakobsson and his colleagues have now published their results in Nature Communications.

"At present, researchers know very little about exactly how microglia work. At the same time, there is a lot of curiosity and high hopes among brain researchers that greater understanding of microglia could lead to entirely new drug development strategies for various brain diseases", says Johan Jakobsson, research group leader at the Division of Molecular Neurogenetics at Lund University.

Long term exposure to air pollution may be linked to heart attacks and strokes by speeding up atherosclerosis, or "hardening of the arteries", according to a study by U.S. researchers published in this week's PLOS Medicine.

PHILADELPHIA— Researchers from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania have shown that an area of the brain that initiates behavioral changes had greater activation in smokers who watched anti-smoking ads with strong arguments versus those with weaker ones, and irrespective of flashy elements, like bright and rapidly changing scenes, loud sounds and unexpected scenario twists.

EUGENE, Ore. -- (April 23, 2013) -- A specific region of the brain is in play when children consider their identity and social status as they transition into adolescence -- that often-turbulent time of reaching puberty and entering middle school, says a University of Oregon psychologist.

In a study of 27 neurologically typical children who underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) at ages 10 and 13, activity in the brain's ventromedial prefrontal cortex increased dramatically when the subjects responded to questions about how they view themselves.

It's no accident that money obtained through dishonest or illegal means is called "dirty money." A new study from the University of California, Berkeley, suggests that when people perceive money as morally tainted, they also view it as having less value and purchasing power.

In their article "Over 30 million psychedelic users in the United States", Teri S Krebs and Pål-Ørjan Johansen from the Department of Neuroscience at Norwegian University of Science and Technology, use data from a randomly-selected sample of over 57,000 individuals surveyed for the 2010 National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH), to estimate lifetime prevalence of psychedelic use. The authors estimate that approximately 32 million people have used LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide), psilocybin ("magic mushrooms"), or mescaline (peyote and other cacti) in their lifetime.

Boston, MA—The microbiome is your body's set of microbial communities; microbial cells outnumber human cells roughly ten to one. Through studying the microbiome, scientists are learning more the relationship between these microbes and human health and disease. In looking at the effect of diet on the composition of the gut microbiome, Dr. Nanette Steinle of the University of Maryland's School of Medicine and Dr. Emmanuel Mongodin of the University of Maryland Institute of Genome Sciences wanted to determine if the Mediterranean diet would cause changes in an individual's microbiome.