Brain

At Scott & White Memorial Hospital, a multi-disciplinary team of neurosurgeons, neurologists, neurophysiologist, neuropsychologists and a movement disorders specialist are offering hope to some Parkinson's patients with a treatment called Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS). DBS involves placing a thin wire that carries electrical currents deep within the brain on Parkinson's patients who are no longer benefitting from medications, and have significant uncontrollable body movements called dyskinesia.

Congenital heart defects (CHD) are the most common birth defects in humans, affecting 8 per 1000 live births with one third of affected children requiring intervention in early infancy. Increasing numbers of survivors combined with developmental expectations for independence, behavioral self-regulation and academic achievement have led to a growing identification of neurobehavioral symptoms in some survivors. A study now suggests that a cooling technique often used in heart operations does not impair neurological outcomes.

Philadelphia, PA, 26 January 2010 - Even with the best of available treatments, over a third of patients with depression may not achieve a satisfactory antidepressant response. Deep brain stimulation (DBS), a form of targeted electrical stimulation in the brain via implanted electrodes, is now undergoing careful testing to determine whether it could play a role in the treatment of patients who have not sufficiently improved during more traditional forms of treatment.

This week PLoS Medicine publishes the last in a four-part series of policy papers examining the ways in which global health institutions and arrangements are changing and evolving.

Researchers have identified a compound that mimics one of the brain's own growth factors and can protect brain cells against damage in several animal models of neurological disease.

7,8-dihydroxyflavone is a member of the flavonoid family of chemicals, which are abundant in fruits and vegetables. The compound's selective effects suggest that it could be the founder of a new class of brain-protecting drugs.

The results were published online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Weight-bearing exercises may help minimize cognitive decline and impaired mobility in seniors, according to a new study conducted by the Centre for Hip Health and Mobility at Vancouver Coastal Health and the University of British Columbia.

Although changing social and cultural contexts mean guilt has less power today than it once did, a new study has shown that in the West this emotion is "significantly higher" among women. The main problem, according to the experts, is not that women feel a lot of guilt (which they do), but rather that many males feel "too little".

Would you choose to receive a small amount of money today or a larger sum next month? We know that it is worth it to wait longer for a larger reward, but sometimes the temptation for the smaller, immediate reward becomes too great and we simply cannot resist it. Selecting the immediate reward is known as "future discounting" and often suggests a lack of self-control.

LA JOLLA, CA – January 25, 2010 – A team of scientists from The Scripps Research Institute has found that a specific stress hormone, the corticotropin-releasing factor (CRF), is key to the development and maintenance of alcohol dependence in animal models. Chemically blocking the stress factor also blocked the signs and symptoms of addiction, suggesting a potentially promising area for future drug development.

The article, the culmination of more than six years of research, will appear in an upcoming print edition of the journal Biological Psychiatry.

Though parents often have concerns about letting their teens use social media Web sites like Facebook and MySpace, a new study by University of Virginia psychologists suggests that well-adapted youth with positive friendships will use these sites to further enhance the positive relationships they already have.

However, they warn, teens who have behavioral problems and difficulty making friends, or who are depressed, may be more inclined to use social media in negative and sometimes aggressive ways, or not to use such sites at all.

Female elementary school teachers who are anxious about math pass on to female students the stereotype that boys, not girls, are good at math. Girls who endorse this belief then do worse at math, research at the University of Chicago shows.

These findings are the product of a year-long study on 17 first- and second-grade teachers and 52 boys and 65 girls who were their students. The researchers found that boys' math performance was not related to their teacher's math anxiety while girls' math achievement was affected.

(Santa Barbara, Calif.) –– Research performed at UC Santa Barbara points to the drug rapamycin as a potential treatment for kidney disease. The study builds on past research and shows that studies performed on mice are more likely to translate to humans than previously thought. The results are published in the current online issue of the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology.

Researchers at The University of Western Ontario (Western) led an international and multi-disciplinary study that sheds new light on the way that bats echolocate. With echolocation, animals emit sounds and then listen to the reflected echoes of those sounds to form images of their surroundings in their brains.

WASHINGTON—Psychodynamic psychotherapy is effective for a wide range of mental health symptoms, including depression, anxiety, panic and stress-related physical ailments, and the benefits of the therapy grow after treatment has ended, according to new research published by the American Psychological Association.

ROCHESTER, Minn. -- Preventing deadly ruptures of the blood vessels in the brain is the aim of a new Mayo Clinic project to help radiologists detect aneurysms with far greater speed and accuracy. The new method uses analytics technology developed by the Mayo and IBM collaboration, Medical Imaging Informatics Innovation Center and has proven a 95 percent accuracy rate in detecting aneurysms, compared with 70 percent for manual interpretation. Project findings were reported in the Journal of Digital Imaging (published online Nov. 24, 2009).