Brain

The largest epidemiological study of Parkinson's disease in the United States has found that the disease is more common in the Midwest and the Northeast and is twice as likely to strike whites and Hispanics as blacks and Asians.

The study, based on data from 36 million Medicare recipients, is both the first to produce any significant information on patterns of Parkinson's disease in minorities and to show geographic clusters for the condition.

The onset of schizophrenia is not easy to predict. Although it is associated with as many as 14 genes in the human genome, the prior presence of schizophrenia in the family is not enough to determine whether one will succumb to the mind-altering condition. The disease also has a significant environmental link.

Estimates are that some 10 percent of people over the age of 65 will develop Alzheimer's disease, the scourge that robs people of their memories and, ultimately, their lives.

While researchers race to find both the cause and the cure, others are moving just as fast to find the earliest signs that will predict an eventual onset of the disease, well before any outward symptoms. The reason is simple: The earlier the diagnosis, the earlier treatments can be applied.

New research suggests that evolutionary changes in cognitive development underlie the extensive social and behavioral differences that exist between two closely related species of great apes. The study, published online on January 28th in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication, enhances our understanding of our two closest living relatives, chimpanzees and the lesser-known bonobos, and may provide key insight into human evolution.

The commonly held assumption that as primates evolved, their brains always tended to get bigger has been challenged by a team of scientists at Cambridge and Durham. Their work helps solve the mystery of whether Homo floresiensis – dubbed the Hobbit due to its diminutive stature – was a separate human species or a diseased individual.

Challenging prevailing wisdom that only children with end-stage kidney disease suffer physical, social, emotional and educational setbacks from their disease, research led by Johns Hopkins Children's Center shows that even mild to moderate kidney disease may seriously diminish a child's quality of life.

The findings, reported in the February issue of Pediatrics, suggest that earlier attention to quality-of-life issues in children with chronic kidney disease is needed.

The act and victimization of bullying continues to be a problem among today's youth. While many children are experiencing this form of violence, it is more prevalent in children that are different from the social norm. As medical professionals continue to further their understanding of bullying, research shows a high rate of sexual minority youth who experience this harmful activity.

The adverse effects of prenatal alcohol exposure on behavioral, cognitive, and social development can lead to a range of symptoms referred to as fetal alcohol spectrum disorder (FASD). Attention and cognition problems seen in individuals with a history of prenatal alcohol exposure often resemble those linked to attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). An assessment of these disorders has found that while children with FASD may meet the behavioral criteria for ADHD, their attention difficulties differ in subtle but important respects.

Prenatal alcohol exposure is widely known to impair brain development in exposed offspring. Rodent studies have shown that developmental deficits in newborns related to altered levels of a brain chemical called serotonin (5-HT), leading to subsequent alterations in patterns of neonatal acute pain responses and/or hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) stress reactivity. New findings show a "blunted response" to an acutely painful event – a heel lance – in alcohol-exposed human newborns, indicating that prenatal alcohol exposure may alter the brain's developing pain regulatory system.

• Social factors are known to contribute to vulnerability to alcohol use and abuse.
• New research has looked at linkages between high-risk drinking among older adults and their social and financial resources.
• Older drinkers who have more money, engage in more social activities, and whose friends approve more of drinking are more likely to engage in excessive or high-risk drinking.

• There are few studies of alcohol use among the elderly.
• A study of drinking among the elderly in Brazil has found that heavy alcohol use is associated with more memory and cognitive problems than mild-to-moderate alcohol use, especially among women.
• Mild-to-moderate alcohol use was associated with lower cognitive disorder rates than no alcohol use, also among women.

MADISON, Wis. -- The brains of people under anesthesia respond to stimuli as they do in the deepest part of sleep – lending credence to a developing theory of consciousness and suggesting a new method to assess loss of consciousness in conditions such as coma.

Scientists at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, led by brain researcher Fabio Ferrarelli, reported their findings in this week's edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.

Draw a map of the brain when fear and anxiety are involved, and the amygdala—the brain's almond-shaped center for panic and fight-or-flight responses—looms large.

But the amygdala doesn't do its job alone. Scientists at Emory University have recently built upon work from others, extending the fear map to part of the brain known as the prelimbic cortex.

Following an argument or a particularly heated discussion with our partner, they may remember details of the conversation very differently than we do. This may lead to even more arguments, as we try to convince the other that our recollection of the argument is more correct then theirs.

Some people are annoyed by upspeak: the habit of making a sentence sound like a question?

But actually, being able to change intonation in speech – as in upspeak – may be a sign of superior empathy?

A new study in the journal PLoS ONE finds that people use the same brain regions to produce and understand intonation in speech.

Many studies suggest that people learn by imitating through so-called mirror neurons. This study shows for the first time that prosody – the music of speech – also works on a mirror-like system.