Newsline — Wednesday, November 21, 2012 8:00
Gray Matter in Einstein’s Brain Reveals Clues to His Genius
Disrupted Development of Immature Brain Cells Causes Hydrocephalus
Tuesday, November 20, 2012 10:26
University of Iowa researchers have discovered a new cause of hydrocephalus, a neurological disorder that affects between one and three of every 1,000 babies born. Working with mice, investigators identified a cell signaling defect, which disrupts immature brain cells involved in normal brain development. By bypassing the defect with a drug treatment, the team was able to correct one aspect of the cells’ development and reduce the severity of the hydrocephalus. Their findings appear in the Nov. 18 online edition of the journal Nature Medicine. “Our findings identify a new molecular mechanism underlying the development of neonatal hydrocephalus,” says Calvin Carter, a student in the University of Iowa Graduate Program in Neuroscience and first author of the study. “By targeting this defective signaling pathway in mice using an FDA-approved drug, we were able to successfully treat this disease non-invasively.” For more information, click here to read the full release.
Mayo Clinic Arizona to Offer New Treatment for Recurrent Glioblastoma
Monday, November 19, 2012 9:00
Mayo Clinic in Scotsdale, Ariz., is the first and only clinical center in the Southwest to offer a new treatment that disrupts the growth of recurrent glioblastoma brain tumors. The new treatment features the NovoTTF-100A System — a portable, noninvasive medical device that affixes to a patient’s head and provides continuous electrical pulses targeted to tumor sites throughout the day. The device has been shown to slow and reverse tumor growth by inhibiting mitosis, the process by which cells divide and replicate. “Glioblastoma is a difficult disease, and what is exciting is that we’re now able to offer a treatment option to patients who have not been able to tolerate other treatments,” says Alyx Porter-Umphrey, MD, neuro-oncologist at Mayo Clinic in Arizona. For more information, click here to read the full release.
Drexel Researchers Explore the Anatomy of Recollection in Epilepsy Patients
Friday, November 16, 2012 8:00
What was your high school mascot? Where did you put your keys last night? Who was the first U.S. president? Groups of neurons in your brain currently are sending electromagnetic rhythms through established pathways in order for you to recall the answers to each of these questions. And now researchers at the Drexel University School of Biomedical Engineering, Science and Health Systems are getting a rare look inside the brain to discover the exact pattern of activity that produces a memory. “When performing seizure mapping, surgeons implant electrodes in many brain areas, while searching for seizure activity,” says Joshua Jacobs, PhD, of Drexel, who is analyzing data accumulated from 60 epilepsy patients who have had electrodes implanted on their brains in order to determine the causes of their epileptic episodes. “Thus, there many electrodes end up being in normal brain tissue, and they measure neuronal activity that reflects normal brain function — this is the function that we’re studying to learn about the nature of working memory.” For more information, click here to read the…
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Fear of Surgery Prevents People from Getting Back Pain Help
Thursday, November 15, 2012 13:00
People are so fearful of being told they will need surgery that they may not seek even the most basic help for their back pain — that’s according to a recent North American Spine Society (NASS) member survey. “It is heartbreaking to see that myths and an unnecessary fear of surgery are holding people back from getting even the most conservative help for their back pain,” says Joseph S. Cheng, MD, MS, FAANs, associate professor of neurological surgery at Vanderbilt University Medical Center and chair of the NASS Public Affairs Committee. “The truth is that surgeons spend most of their time telling new patients that they do not need spine surgery!” The vast majority (90 percent) of people with back pain will get better without treatment or by using conservative treatments such as anti-inflammatory medication, exercise, coping skills and physical therapy, reports the NASS, which also notes that spine surgery is recommended in only about one percent of cases, with very specific diagnoses, after a more conservative course of treatment already has been tried. For…
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Combination of Head Injury and Pesticide Exposure May Triple Risk of Parkinson’s Disease
Thursday, November 15, 2012 9:26
New research shows that people who have had a head injury and lived or worked near areas where the pesticide paraquat was used may be three times more likely to develop Parkinson’s disease. Paraquat is a herbicide commonly used on crops to control weeds. It can be deadly to humans and animals. The study appears in the Nov. 13, 2012, print issue of Neurology, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. “While each of these two factors is associated with an increased risk of Parkinson’s on their own, the combination is associated with greater risk than just adding the two factors together,” says study author Beate Ritz, MD, PhD, of UCLA’s Fielding School of Public Health. “This study suggests that the physiological process that is triggered by a head injury may increase brain cells’ vulnerability to attacks from pesticides that can be toxic to the brain or the other way around; for example, chronic low-dose exposure to pesticides may increase the risk of Parkinson’s after a head injury.” For more information, click here…
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Study Says Soccer Players May Injure Brains When ‘Heading’ Ball
Wednesday, November 14, 2012 13:00
Soccer players who repeatedly strike the ball with their heads may be causing measurable damage to their brains, even if they never suffer a concussion, reports a new study that appears in the Journal of the American Medical Association. By examining brain scans of a dozen professional soccer players from Germany, researchers found a pattern of damage that strongly resembled that of patients with mild traumatic brain injury, according to Inga Katharina Koerte, MD, a neuroradiologist at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital, who led the study. Dr. Koerte and her colleagues focused on the athletes’ white matter — the interior portion of the brain that carries signals from nerve cells to the spinal cord. They tracked the movement of individual water molecules within the brain tissue to see whether the atoms moved in a narrow linear pattern or in a random, diffuse pattern. Movement along a narrow track suggested the molecules were being hemmed in by healthy fibers. Diffusion, however, suggested that brain tissue had suffered some form of damage and could no longer restrict…
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Niagara Falls Memorial Medical Center Unveils Robotic Surgery Suite
Wednesday, November 14, 2012 10:09
On Monday, Niagara Falls Memorial Medical Center dedicated a new surgical suite to house its robotic surgery program. The $3 million project expanded the patient recovery area, updated and redecorated the family waiting area, and supported technology upgrades, including the purchase of a $1.7 million robotic surgery machine. In February, the hospital announced it had acquired the da Vinci Si robotic surgery system. The project comes in response to a rising volume of surgeries at the medical center, according to officials. For more information, click here to read the full release.
High School Athlete Designs Award-Winning Concussion Sensor
Tuesday, November 13, 2012 13:00
Having suffered a broken collarbone twice in the past year while playing both football and lacrosse, teenager Braeden Benedict knows a thing or two about sports injuries. And he’s now on a path to develop a device that eventually may help detect one of the scariest football injuries of all: concussion. A small mechanical sensor Benedict designed could become a low-cost, mass-produced device that fits on the front of helmets and releases a liquid that is visible from the sidelines, warning coaches and trainers that a player should be checked for a possible head injury. The idea won the 15-year-old the top prize in the Discovery Education 3M Young Scientist Challenge last year, for which he was named “American’s Top Young Scientist,” earned a visit to the White House and won $25,000, most of which he’s putting away for college. While many contestants may have abandoned their ideas by now, Benedict, now a sophomore at Palos Verdes Peninsula High School in Arizona, is pushing forward. He has submitted an application for a provisional patent and continues…
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Researcher Tests Claim that Tau, not Plaque, Is Cause for Alzheimer’s Disease
Tuesday, November 13, 2012 8:00
As a young PhD student at Cambridge University in the 1980s, Claude Wischik, MD, PhD, was on a mission to collect brains in an effort to determine what causes Alzheimer’s disease (AD), which afflicts about 36 million people worldwide. Over a dozen years, he collected more than 300 brains from patients soon after death. The Alzheimer’s researcher from Australia has long backed the minority view that a protein in the brain called tau — not plaque — is largely responsible for AD. The 63-year-old believes that a protein called tau — which forms twisted fibers known as tangles inside the brain cells of Alzheimer’s patients — is largely responsible for driving the disease, in a theory that goes against much of the scientific community. For 20 years, billions of dollars of pharmaceutical investment has supported a different theory that places chief blame on a different protein, beta amyloid, which forms sticky plaques in the brains of sufferers. But a string of experimental drugs designed to attack beta amyloid recently failed in clinical trials, including two this…
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