Brain

MINNEAPOLIS – People with higher levels of the omega-3 fatty acids found in fish oil may also have larger brain volumes in old age equivalent to preserving one to two years of brain health, according to a study published in the January 22, 2014, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. Shrinking brain volume is a sign of Alzheimer's disease as well as normal aging.

JUPITER, FL, January 22, 2013 – How aging affects communication between neurons is not well understood, a gap that makes it more difficult to treat a range of disorders, including Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease.

Cold Spring Harbor, NY – Structural biologists at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) and collaborators at Emory University have obtained important scientific results likely to advance efforts to develop new drugs targeting NMDA receptors in the brain.

Working alongside teams from leading research institutions including the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, the Broad Institute of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Harvard, and Cambridge Universities, they examined DNA blood samples from 623 sufferers and their parents.

The study showed that "de novo" mutations, which are found in affected individuals but not their parents, play a role in triggering the disorder but more importantly that they preferentially disrupt specific sets of proteins which have related functions in the brain.

Although the brain becomes smaller with age, the shrinkage seems to be fast-tracked in older adults with hearing loss, according to the results of a study by researchers from Johns Hopkins and the National Institute on Aging. The findings add to a growing list of health consequences associated with hearing loss, including increased risk of dementia, falls, hospitalizations, and diminished physical and mental health overall.

Dopamine-restoring drugs already used to treat Parkinson's disease may also be beneficial for the treatment of diabetic retinopathy, a leading cause of blindness in adults, researchers have discovered.

The results were published in the Jan. 15 issue of Journal of Neuroscience.

Diabetic retinopathy affects more than a quarter of adults with diabetes and threatening the vision of more than 600,000 people in the United States.

Ready, set, go.

Sometimes that's how our brains work. When we anticipate a physical act, such as reaching for the keys we noticed on the table, the neurons that control the task adopt a state of readiness, like sprinters bent into a crouch.

Other times, however, our neurons must simply react, such as if someone were to toss us the keys without gesturing first, to prepare us to catch.

How do the neurons in the brain control planned versus unplanned arm movements?

Children understand numbers differently than adults. For kids, one and two seem much further apart then 101 and 102, because two is twice as big as one, and 102 is just a little bigger than 101. It's only after years of schooling that we're persuaded to see the numbers in both sets as only one integer apart on a number line.

Computer software similar to that used by online retailers to recommend products to a shopper can help students remember the content they've studied, according to a new study by the University of Colorado Boulder.

The software, created by computer scientists at CU-Boulder's Institute for Cognitive Science, works by tapping a database of past student performance to suggest what material an individual student most needs to review.

PITTSBURGH—Professionals, such as doctors, lawyers and financial advisers, face conflicts of interest (COIs) when they have a personal, and often financial, interest in giving biased advice. Therefore, requiring COI disclosure has become a popular way to try and protect consumers from biased advice, but previous research has shown that mandatory disclosures have little impact on advice recipients, and may even lead advisers to give more biased advice. However, virtually all of the prior studies questioned the effectiveness of COI disclosures that advisers were unable to avoid.

PHILADELPHIA--Researchers at Penn Medicine have generated a brain development index from MRI scans that captures the complex patterns of maturation during normal brain development. This index will allow clinicians and researchers for the first time to detect subtle, yet potentially critical early signs of deviation from normal development during late childhood to early adult.

The study, published online in the journal Cerebral Cortex, shows a relationship between cognitive development and physical changes in the developing young brain (aged 8 to 21).

New York, NY –Jan. 16, 2014 – Exposing adolescent rats to THC (tetrahydrocannabinol) –the primary psychoactive ingredient in marijuana—can lead to molecular and behavioral alterations in the next generation of offspring, even though progeny were not directly exposed to the drug, researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai have found. Male offspring showed stronger motivation to self-administer heroin during their adulthood and molecular changes in the glutamatergic system, which is the most important excitatory pathway for neurotransmission in the brain.

Hamilton, ON (Jan. 21, 2014) -- Contrary to popular belief, fever-reducing medication may inadvertently cause more harm than good.

New research from McMaster University has discovered that the widespread use of medications that contain fever-reducing drugs may lead to tens of thousands more influenza cases, and more than a thousand deaths attributable to influenza, each year across North America. These drugs include ibuprofen, acetaminophen and acetylsalicylic acid.

A study has found that homing pigeons' ability to remember routes depends on the complexity of the landscape below, with hedges and boundaries between urban and rural areas providing ideal landmarks for navigation.

Using a simple study of eye movements, Johns Hopkins scientists report evidence that people who are less patient tend to move their eyes with greater speed. The findings, the researchers say, suggest that the weight people give to the passage of time may be a trait consistently used throughout their brains, affecting the speed with which they make movements, as well as the way they make certain decisions.