Brain

Philadelphia, PA, February 3, 2014 – The white matter microstructure, the communication pathways of the brain, continues to develop/mature as one ages. Studies link age-related differences in white matter microstructure to specific cognitive abilities in childhood and adulthood.

Most prior studies, however, did not include individuals from the entire life span or evaluated a limited section of white matter tracts. This knowledge gap prompted a new study published this week in Biological Psychiatry.

In a study to be presented on Feb. 6 at 2:45 p.m. CST, at the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine's annual meeting, The Pregnancy Meeting™, in New Orleans, researchers will report that a variant in SERPINE1, a gene involved in inflammation and blood clotting, is associated with cerebral palsy and death in very preterm babies. This gene has been associated with increased risk of cerebral palsy in one previous study of preterm babies.

In a study to be presented on Feb. 6 at 3 p.m. CST, at the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine's annual meeting, The Pregnancy Meeting™, in New Orleans, researchers will report that women ages 35 and older are at a decreased risk of having a child with a major congenital malformation, after excluding chromosomal abnormalities.

In a study to be presented on Feb. 6 at 3:15 p.m. CST, at the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine's annual meeting, The Pregnancy Meeting™, in New Orleans, researchers will report on a correlation between initial neonatal and early childhood outcomes among children delivered less than 34 weeks gestation.

The more positively minority youth feel about their ethnicity or race, the fewer symptoms of depression and emotional and behavior problems they have. That's the conclusion of a new meta-analysis summarizing 46 existing studies.

Published in the journal Child Development, the meta-analysis was conducted by researchers at Brown University, the University of Minnesota, Arizona State University, the University of Illinois at Chicago, and the University of Miami.

Previous research has suggested that shy children have difficulties with language. Now, a new longitudinal study paints a more nuanced picture. The study, of 816 toddlers, found that children who are inhibited in their behavior tend to speak less but understand what's being said as well as less shy peers. In other words, these children have performance problems when speaking with others, but don't lack capability, suggesting that they're merely reluctant to respond rather than delayed or deficient in understanding language.

There are sleep cycles and there are also weight loss cycles. Almost everyone loses weight on weekdays and gains weight on weekends. What separates the slim from the heavy isn't how much more they gain on weekends. It's how much they lose during the weekdays. In this study, Dr. Brian Wansink from Cornell University, in collaboration with researchers from the VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland and Tampere University of Technology, looks into the impact that the seven-days-a-week human cycle has on weight.

Stanford researchers may have solved a riddle about the inner workings of the brain, which consists of billions of neurons, organized into many different regions, with each region primarily responsible for different tasks.

The various regions of the brain often work independently, relying on the neurons inside that region to do their work. At other times, however, two regions must cooperate to accomplish the task at hand.

In many people with autism and other neurodevelopmental disorders, different parts of the brain don't talk to each other very well. Scientists have now identified, for the first time, a way in which this decreased functional connectivity can come about.

West Orange, NJ. January 31, 2014. Researchers at Kessler Foundation have studied the measurement tools used in multiple sclerosis for their effectiveness in predicting employment status. They compared the Expanded Disability Status Scale (EDSS), the Multiple Sclerosis Functional Composite (MSFC), the Paced Auditory Serial Addition Task (PASAT), and the Symbol Digit Modalities Test (SDMT), and found the SDMT effective in differentiating employed from unemployed individuals.

West Orange, NJ. January 31, 2014. Kessler Foundation researchers have shown that retrieval practice can improve memory in individuals with severe traumatic brain injury (TBI). "Retrieval Practice Improves Memory in Survivors of Severe Traumatic Brain Injury," was published as a brief report in the current issue of Archives of Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation Volume 95, Issue 2 (390-396) February 2014. The article is authored by James Sumowski, PhD, Julia Coyne, PhD, Amanda Cohen, BA, and John DeLuca, PhD, of Kessler Foundation.

New research from Case Western Reserve University and University of Toronto neuroscientists finds that the brains of autistic children generate more information at rest – a 42% increase on average. The study offers a scientific explanation for the most typical characteristic of autism – withdrawal into one's own inner world. The excess production of information may explain a child's detachment from their environment.

Discussing five movies about relationships over a month could cut the three-year divorce rate for newlyweds in half, researchers report. The study, involving 174 couples, is the first long-term investigation to compare different types of early marriage intervention programs.

The findings show that an inexpensive, fun, and relatively simple movie-and-talk approach can be just as effective as other more intensive therapist-led methods—reducing the divorce or separation rate from 24 to 11 percent after three years.

Motor commands issued by the brain to activate arm muscles take two different routes. As the research group led by Professor Silvia Arber at the University of Basel's Biozentrum and the Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research has now discovered, many neurons in the spinal cord send their instructions not only towards the musculature, but at the same time also back to the brain via an exquisitely organized network. This dual information stream provides the neural basis for accurate control of arm and hand movements. These findings have now been published in Cell.

Wolves were domesticated more than 15,000 years ago and it is widely assumed that the ability of domestic dogs to form close relationships with humans stems from changes during the domestication process. But the effects of domestication on the interactions between the animals have not received much attention. The point has been addressed by Friederike Range and Zsófia Virányi, two members of the University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna (Vetmeduni Vienna) who work at the Wolf Science Center (WSC) in Ernstbrunn, Niederösterreich.