Brain

Acute hemorrhagic anemia can decrease blood flow and oxygen supply to brain, and affect its physiological function. Detecting changes in brain function in patients with acute hemorrhagic anemia is helpful for preventing neurological complications and evaluating therapeutic effects. Susceptibility-weighted imaging (SWI) imaging is a novel, non-invasive method for detecting changes in cerebral oxygen levels that may provide more detailed information regarding cerebral blood flow in patients with hemorrhage. Dr.

Neuropeptide Y exhibits neuroprotective effects. Whether the neuroprotective effects are mediated by the pathways including regulating the immunological activity of reactive microglia and reducing cytokines remains unclear. Prof. Wenqing Zhao, Graduate School, Heibei Medical University, China and his team confirmed that neuropeptide Y prevented excessive production of interleukin-1β and tumor necrosis factor-α by inhibiting microglial reactivity, reduced N-methyl-D-aspartate current in rat cortical neurons, preventing excitotoxicity, and thereby protecting neurons.

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) causes gene expression changes in different brain regions. Cyclooxygenase-2, glutamate receptor-2, and platelet activating factor receptor expression levels are related to the occurrence and development of TBI. However, the precise relationship between the expression levels of these three factors and neuronal injury after TBI remains poorly understood.

The main pathological changes of Alzheimer's disease (AD) include amyloid-beta protein-induced hippocampal neuronal injury and neurite outgrowth impairment. Phosphatidylinositol 3-kinase (PI3K)/Akt pathway and mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) pathway are the important signaling pathways respectively responsible for regulating synaptic plasticity and neuronal survival. In view of the fact that ginsenoside Rb1 exhibits anti-aging and anti-dementia effects, Prof.

It is currently difficult to treat traumatic brain injury (TBI) in the clinic. There are abundant neural network connections and humoral regulation mechanisms between the cerebral hemispheres. Brain tissue on the uninjured side after TBI may also undergo abnormal changes, but these changes remain poorly understood.

The over-expression of α-synuclein is a major factor in the death of dopaminergic neurons in a methamphetamine-induced model of Parkinson's disease (PD). Dr. Huijun Wang, School of Basic Medical Sciences, Southern Medical University, China and his team injected α-synuclein-shRNA lentivirus stereotaxically into the right striatum of experimental rats to inhibit α-synuclein mRNA and protein expression.

CORAL GABLES, Fla. -- It's well known that when a person takes steps to make amends for a wrongdoing, the victim is more inclined to forgive and forget. However, exactly why that happens is less obvious and poorly understood. In a recent study, scientists made substantial progress in explaining the psychological processes that make forgiveness happen.

BEND, Ore. – Girls and young women who post sexy or revealing photos on social media sites such as Facebook are viewed by their female peers as less physically and socially attractive and less competent to perform tasks, a new study from Oregon State University indicates.

"This is a clear indictment of sexy social media photos," said researcher Elizabeth Daniels, an assistant professor of psychology who studies the effect of media on girls' body image. Daniels' findings are based on an experiment she conducted using a fictitious Facebook profile.

Infants can tell the difference between sounds of all languages until about 8 months of age when their brains start to focus only on the sounds they hear around them. It's been unclear how this transition occurs, but social interactions and caregivers' use of exaggerated "parentese" style of speech seem to help.

University of Washington research in 7- and 11-month-old infants shows that speech sounds stimulate areas of the brain that coordinate and plan motor movements for speech.

Older people are nearly twice as likely as their younger counterparts to have their memory and cognitive processes impaired by environmental distractions (such as irrelevant speech or written words presented along with target stimuli), according to a new study from psychologists at Rice University and Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Whereas other studies had found that older adults are distracted by memories of prior similar events, this was the first study to convincingly demonstrate across several tasks an impairment from environmental distractions.

TORONTO, July 14, 2014—Babies born to mothers who immigrated to Ontario from other countries have significantly lower rates of cerebral palsy than those of Canadian-born mothers, especially those from the Caribbean and East Asia, new research has found.

"Predicting who is at highest risk of having a child with CP remains an international priority," said lead author Dr. Joel Ray, who notes that CP rates have not declined much over the last decade.

Modern office workers are expected to multitask regularly, often juggling multiple projects and priorities over the course of a day. Studies have shown that the typical employee in an office environment is interrupted up to six times per hour, but how does that impact the finished product? New research published in Human Factors evaluates how ongoing interruptions can negatively affect the quality of work.

A group of leading brain injury specialists look back on 40 years of the Glasgow Coma Scale and outline the continuing role of the scale in research and clinical practice, in a new Personal View published in The Lancet Neurology.

Washington D.C., July 14, 2014 – A recent study published in the July 2014 issue of the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry confirms the validity of the DSM-5 change to the age of onset criterion for diagnosis of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

Philadelphia, PA, July 14, 2014 – The inability to ignore irrelevant stimuli underlies the impaired working memory and cognition often experienced by individuals diagnosed with schizophrenia, reports a new study in the current issue of Biological Psychiatry.