My dentist must hate me. Every time I go and she wants to do X-rays, I refuse. Nope, I don't want them, they can't be good for you, I don't want that radiation in my body. To which she responds by trying to tell me it's perfectly safe and can help detect any issues. Unless there's a problem that...
The largest study of its kind finds that a history of frequent dental x-rays, particularly at a young age, is tied to an increased risk of developing meningioma, the most common type of primary brain tumor in the United States. Dr Elizabeth Claus, a neurosurgeon at Brigham and Women's Hospital...
If a human tried chopping wood with his head, he'd lose at least one eye and sustain permanent brain damage. But woodpeckers do it all the live long day and sustain zero headular damage. How do they do it? More »
Epilepsy affects 50 million people worldwide, but in a third of these cases, medication cannot keep seizures from occurring. One solution is to shoot a short pulse of electricity to the brain to stamp out the seizure just as it begins to erupt. But brain implants designed to do this have run...
Depressed individuals with a tendency to ruminate on negative thoughts, i.e. to repeatedly think about particular negative thoughts or memories, show different patterns of brain network activation compared to healthy individuals, report scientists of a new study in Biological Psychiatry The risk...
Researchers from Emory and the Georgia Institute of Technology have designed a new treatment approach that appears to halt the spread of cancer cells into normal brain tissue in animal models. Treating invasive brain tumors with a combination of chemotherapy and radiation has improved clinical...
Insulin resistance in the brain precedes and contributes to cognitive decline above and beyond other known causes of Alzheimer's disease, according to a new study by researchers from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. Insulin is an important hormone in many bodily...
Immediate skull reconstruction following trauma that penetrates or creates an indentation in the skull can aggravate brain damage inflicted by the initial injury, a study by a University of South Florida research team reports. Using a rat model for moderate and severe traumatic brain injury...
Two breakthrough studies may explain why we see distinct patterns of brain damage associated with dementias, such as Alzheimer's disease, and could be useful for predicting future cognitive decline in patients. These independent studies published by Cell Press in the March 22 issue of the...
A research team led by the University of Melbourne has developed a novel technique that tracks diseased proteins behaving badly by forming clusters in brain diseases such as Huntington's and Alzheimer's. The technique published in Nature Methods is the first of its kind to rapidly identify and...
If you go far enough back along the branch of the evolutionary tree of life that humans sit on, you get to the part near the trunk where verterbrates (creatures with spines) split from invertebrates (creatures without spines). Current theories suggest the complex brain we share with our...
A study in the February issue of Neurosurgery, official journal of the Congress of Neurological Surgeons, reveals that deep brain stimulation (DBS), commonly used to treat individuals with movement disorders or chronic pain, also affects respiratory function. Lead researcher of the study was Dr...
UCLA life scientists and their colleagues have provided the first evidence of a causal link between traumatic brain injury and an increased susceptibility to post-traumatic stress disorder. Their new study, published in the in the journal Biological Psychology, also suggests that people who...
When you see a picture of a hand, how do you know whether it's a right or left hand? This "hand laterality" problem may seem obscure, but it reveals a lot about how the brain sorts out confusing perceptions. Now, a study which will be published in a forthcoming issue of Psychological Science, a...
Tocagen Inc. has announced the publication of data showing the company's investigational treatment for high grade glioma eradicates brain tumors and provides a dramatic survival benefit in mouse models of glioblastoma. Almost all mice receiving the top dose of Toca 511 followed by 5-FC were...
The way in which Alzheimer's Disease spreads in the brain has been the subject of debate for many years. Two opposing theories have the disease starting independently in weakened brain regions over time, or it beginning in one region and then spreading neuroanatomically connected areas. A study...
A study conducted by Dr. Karen Ersche, Department of Psychiatry, University of Cambridge, England, and published in Science, reveals that one sibling who is addicted to drugs, and the other who is not, have similar brain abnormalities. These abnormalities come from an area of the brain that is...
For years, researchers seeking new therapies for traumatic brain injury have been tantalized by the results of animal experiments with stem cells. In numerous studies, stem cell implantation has substantially improved brain function in experimental animals with brain trauma. But just how these...
University of Miami biology professor Akira Chiba is leading a multidisciplinary team to develop the first systematic survey of protein interactions within brain cells. The team is aiming to reconstruct genome-wide in situ protein-protein interaction networks (isPIN) within the neurons of a...