Brain

ANN ARBOR, Mich.---It's unavoidable: breakdowns in brain connections slow down our physical response times as we age, a new study suggests.

Alzheimer's disease destroys brain cells and their connections (called synapses), causing memory loss and other cognitive problems that disrupt work, hobbies and daily life. Symptoms can be alleviated, in part, by the drug memantine (marketed in the United States as Namenda), which is currently FDA-approved to treat moderate-to-severe Alzheimer's disease and was, in part, developed by Stuart A. Lipton, M.D., Ph.D., Director of the Del E. Web Center for Neuroscience, Aging and Stem Cell Research at Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute (Sanford-Burnham).

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Tricking honey bees into thinking they have traveled long distance to find food alters gene expression in their brains, researchers report this month. Their study, in the journal Genes, Brain and Behavior, is the first to identify distance-responsive genes.

TORONTO – A study led by scientists at The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) reveals a new method of identifying drugs to treat children suffering from fatal cancers for which an effective treatment has not been found. Rather than developing a new drug from scratch, which is a complicated and time-consuming process, they tried a different approach: in the lab, they tested existing drugs on cancer stem cells from young patients with neuroblastoma, one of the common cancers of infants and children. Cancer stem cells are the very cells that scientists suspect are responsible for relapses.

Philadelphia, PA – August 18, 2010 – For more than a century, clinical investigators have focused on early life as a source of adult psychopathology. Although the hypothesized mechanisms have evolved, a central notion remains: early life is a period of unique sensitivity during which experience confers enduring effects.

St. Jude Children's Research Hospital investigators showed a gene named Prox1 is a key player in normal development of a brain structure crucial for learning and memory and remains active throughout life, nurturing the cells vital for making new memories.

B vitamins–B-6, B-12 and folate–all nourish the brain. But much remains to be discovered about the relation between these essential nutrients and our brainpower.

(BOSTON) – The Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy (CSTE) at Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) and Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) announced today that they have provided the first pathological evidence that repetitive head trauma experienced in collision sports is associated with motor neuron disease, a neurological condition that affects voluntary muscle movements. The most common form of motor neuron disease is amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) or Lou Gehrig's disease.

Children are natural psychologists. By the time they're in preschool, they understand that other people have desires, preferences, beliefs, and emotions. But how they learn this isn't clear. A new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, finds that children figure out another person's preferences by using a topic you'd think they don't encounter until college: statistics.

Montreal, August 17, 2010 – Aggressive and hyperactive boys with low parental monitoring are more likely to befriend deviant peers and become heavy drug users as teens, according to a new study published in the journal Addictive Behaviors. Yet the investigation by scientists from the Université de Montréal and Sainte-Justine University Hospital Research Center found that bad boys can be protected from heavy substance use as teenagers if they are highly monitored and befriend good boys as children.

Philadelphia, PA, 17 August 2010 - Everyone is special in their own unique way. From a genetic point of view, no two humans are genetically identical. This means that DNA for each individual contains variants that are more or less comm. on in the overall population.

RICHMOND, Va. (Aug. 16, 2010) – An antidepressant can alleviate symptoms of major depression in women experiencing or about to experience menopause, according to a study released today led by a Virginia Commonwealth University researcher.

Researchers at the Buck Institute for Age Research have successfully used human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) to treat rodents afflicted with Parkinson's Disease (PD). The research, which validates a scalable protocol that the same group had previously developed, can be used to manufacture the type of neurons needed to treat the disease and paves the way for the use of iPSC's in various biomedical applications. Results of the research, from the laboratory of Buck faculty Xianmin Zeng, Ph.D., are published August 16, 2010 in the on-line edition of the journal Stem Cells.