Newsline — Friday, November 30, 2012 13:00
Johns Hopkins Study Finds that Helmets Save Lives of Skiers and Snowboarders
Robots Help Autistic Children to Communicate and Share Emotions
Friday, November 30, 2012 8:00
Robots are being used to teach children with autism about the subtleties of human communication and emotion, and to bring them out of their shells in the classroom. The special learning tools, made by French company Aldebaran Robotics, were created by a neuropsychologist. For more information, click here to watch the Today Show report.
New Zealand Neurosurgeon Successfully Tests New Brain Cancer Vaccine
Thursday, November 29, 2012 12:35
New Zealand neurosurgeon Martin Hunn, MD, of Wellington Hospital has successfully tested a new vaccine for aggressive brain cancer on mice that stimulates the immune system to attack tumors and will help develop a vaccine for people with glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) in the future. According to study results that appear in the Clinical Cancer Research journal, the vaccine — containing tumor cells and an immune-boosting agent derived from marine sponges — was strong enough to kill glioma tumors in mice. For more information, click here to read the full release.
New Biomarker Found to Predict Concussion Outcomes
Thursday, November 29, 2012 8:00
A potential biomarker of the brain’s neuroplasticity may predict improvements in symptoms and quality of life after a concussion, researchers say. In a single-center, case-control study, patients with mild traumatic brain injury (TBI) who had more abnormally high fractional anisotropy (FA) had fewer concussive symptoms and better quality of life a year after their injury than those who had less of the biomarker, according to Michael Lipton, MD, PhD, of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in Bronx, N.Y., and colleagues. They reported their findings during a press briefing at the Radiological Society of North America meeting. “If abnormally high FA represents neuroplastic effects, and if that’s how people recover from brain injury, it would be possible to use this in translational studies to identify the underlying mechanisms of pathology and to identify therapies that don’t look at how we fix the damage, but how we enhance the brain’s ability to compensate for that damage,” Dr. Lipton said during the briefing. For more information, click here to read the full release.
Cancer-Promoting Protein Creates Glucose Path that Feeds Brain Tumors
Wednesday, November 28, 2012 16:16
Researchers at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center have tracked down a cancer-promoting protein’s pathway into the cell nucleus and found out how, once there, it fires up a glucose metabolism pathway on which brain tumors thrive. They also located a vital spot along the protein’s journey that can be attacked with a type of drug not yet deployed against glioblastoma multiforme — the most common and lethal form of brain cancer. The paper, which appears in the online edition of Nature Cell Biology, sheds further light on the importance of pyruvate kinase M2 (PKM2) in cancer development and progression. For more information, click here to read the full release.
University of Michigan Develops Better Brain Implant to Measure Neural Activity
Wednesday, November 28, 2012 8:00
A thin, flexible electrode developed at the University of Michigan could make long-term measurements of neural activity practical. The technology could eventually be used to send signals to prosthetic limbs, overcoming inflammation larger electrodes cause that damages both the brain and the electrodes. The main problem that neurons have with electrodes is that they make terrible neighbors. In addition to being bigger compared than neurons, they are stiff and tend to rub nearby cells the wrong way. The resident immune cells spot the foreigner and attack, inflaming the brain tissue and blocking communication between the electrode and the cells. For more information, click here to read the full release.
Hospital Readmission Rates Found in Administrative Databases May Not Accurately Reflect Surgical Complications
Tuesday, November 27, 2012 13:00
Hospital administrative databases, which are designed to provide general information on hospital stays and associated costs, frequently are used to find information that can lead to quality assessments of care or clinical research. Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) extracted data on hospital readmissions following spine surgery at their institution from an administrative database to assess the clinical relevance of the information and to define clinically relevant predictors of readmission. What they found were readmission numbers substantially larger than expected or appropriate. The researchers’ findings are reported in “Pitfalls of calculating hospital readmission rates based on non-validated administrative data sets. Clinical article,” by Beejal Y. Amin, MD, and colleagues. The article is available online, ahead of print, in the Journal of Neurosurgery: Spine. For more information, click here to read the full release.
Study Shows How Social Isolation Disrupts Myelin Production in Brain
Tuesday, November 27, 2012 8:00
Animals that are socially isolated for prolonged periods produce less myelin in the region of the brain responsible for complex emotional and cognitive behavior, say researchers at the University at Buffalo and Mount Sinai School of Medicine. Their report appears online in Nature Neuroscience. The study sheds new light on brain plasticity — the brain’s ability to adapt to environmental changes. For one, it reveals that neurons aren’t the only brain structures that undergo changes in response to environment and experience, according to one of the paper’s lead authors, Karen Dietz, PhD, a research scientist in the Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology in the University at Buffalo School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences. For more information, click here to read the full release.
Research Suggests That Brain Compensates for Damage After Traumatic Injury
Monday, November 26, 2012 15:03
Researchers at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University and Montefiore Medical Center have found that a special magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) technique may predict which patients who have experienced concussions will improve. The results, presented at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA), suggest that, in some patients, the brain may change to compensate for the damage caused by the injury. “This finding could lead to strategies for preventing and repairing the damage that accompanies traumatic brain injury,” said Michael Lipton, MD, PhD, who led the study and is associate director of the Gruss Magnetic Resonance Research Center at Einstein and medical director of MRI services at Montefiore, the University Hospital and academic medical center for Einstein. For more information, click here to read the full release.
Medical Centers Offering New Programs to Improve Concussion Care in Teens
Wednesday, November 21, 2012 13:00
At ice hockey camp two summers ago, goalie Beth Potter slammed her head into the ice when she dived to block a shot, resulting in a concussion with aftereffects that affect her to this day. Young athletes like Potter, now 18, are the focus of new efforts to improve the care of concussions in children and teens, who are more vulnerable than adults to long-term physical, cognitive and emotional problems as a result of the brain injury. Today, medical centers such as Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, N.H., Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center offer new programs to better educate school nurses, coaches, athletic directors, parents, and pediatricians about steps to take to avoid repeat trauma and complications. New research also is leading to a better understanding of concussion, which occurs when a sudden movement or direct force to the head sets brain tissue in motion within the skull. Studies show, for example, that each patient may experience concussion differently; in addition, some patients are more genetically predisposed to sustaining…
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