BrainBlog

From The New York Times : Lives Diminishing Returns By KATHERINE NICHOLS Published: June 24, 2007 During the two years leading up to his diagnosis, my husband, a highly respected physician, struggled to communicate and complete work, left me in doubt about his truthfulness, accumulated debt I was unaware of and wrote a series of notes that I found bizarre and degrading. Yet he often seemed so loving and well. I wondered if the insanity began with me. [ ... Read the entire column ... ]

From the Scientific American website: May 20, 2007 The Traveler's Dilemma When playing this simple game, people consistently reject the rational choice. In fact, by acting illogically, they end up reaping a larger reward--an outcome that demands a new kind of for­mal reasoning By Kaushik Basu Lucy and Pete, returning from a remote Pacific island, find that the airline has damaged the identical antiques that each had purchased. An airline manager says that he is happy to compensate them but is handicapped by being clueless about the value of these strange objects. Simply asking the travelers for the price is hopeless, he figures, for they will inflate it. Instead he devises a more complicated scheme. He asks each of them to write down the price of the antique as any dollar integer between 2 and 100 without conferring together. If both write the same number, he will take that to be the true price, and he will pay each of them that amount. But if they write different numb...

From the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation : Neurological conditions cost Canada nearly $9B a year: report Last Updated: Friday, June 22, 2007 | 5:02 PM ET CBC News Neurological conditions such as stroke and Alzheimer's disease cost Canada nearly $9 billion a year in direct costs, say neurologists who warn the health-care system may not be able to handle increased costs of an aging population. Early diagnosis of neurological diseases will help reduce long-term costs, says Dr. Charles Tator. Friday's report from the Canadian Institute for Health Information, titled The Burden of Neurological Diseases, Disorders and Injuries in Canada is a consensus report by neurologists who tallied the costs of 11 conditions they treat: Alzheimer's disease Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig's disease) Brain tumours Cerebral palsy Epilepsy Head injury Headaches Multiple sclerosis Parkinson's disease Spinal injuries Stroke The conditions represent an estimated almost seven per...

From a 13 June 2007 press release from the University of Pennsylvania: Penn Researchers Link Cell’s Protein Recycling Systems Implications for Treating Neurodegenerative Disorders (PHILADELPHIA) – Many age-related neurological diseases are associated with defective proteins accumulating in nerve cells, suggesting that the cell’s normal disposal mechanisms are not operating correctly. Now, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine have discovered a molecular link between the cell’s two major pathways for breaking down proteins and have succeeded in using this link to rescue neurodegenerative diseases in a simple animal model. The study appears this week in Nature . The cell has two internal pathways for breaking down proteins. The ubiquitin-proteasome pathway marks unwanted proteins with ubiquitin tags and shuttles them for rapid breakdown to a complicated structure called the proteasome. The second is the autophagy-lysosomal system, a more general process in wh...

From the INS website: "The 2007 Mid-Year meeting is a collaboration between [the International Neuropsychological Society] INS, the Federation of Spanish Neuropsychological Associations and the Spanish Psychiatry Society. The theme for this meeting is "Advances in Basic and Clinical Neuropsychology" . It promises to be a scientifically stimulating meeting, with over 500 abstracts being presented. The meeting will be held on July 4 -7, 2007 at the Palacio de Congresos y de la Musica Euskalduna." Additional information, including the program, can be found on the INS website: click here

From tomorrow's New York Times : Taking on Alzheimer's , by Stephanie Saul.

Read about Alzheimer's care in Pakistan at Alzheimer's Pakistan .

Hubbard PS, Esiri MM, Reading M, McShane R, & Nagy Z. Alpha-synuclein pathology in the olfactory pathways of dementia patients. Journal of Anatomy. 2007 Jun 6; [Epub ahead of print] Division of Neuroscience, The Medical School, University of Birmingham, UK. Lewy-type pathology is a characteristic of a number of neurodegenerative disorders, including Parkinson's disease and dementia with Lewy bodies. Thus far, the definitive diagnosis of these dementias can only be confirmed at post-mortem. However, it is known that the loss of smell (anosmia) is an early symptom in patients who develop dementia, and the use of the smell test has been proposed as an early diagnostic procedure. The aim of this study was to understand further the extent of Lewy pathology in the olfactory system of patients with neurodegenerative disorders. Post-mortem tissue from 250 subjects was obtained from the OPTIMA brain bank. Five areas of the olfactory pathway were examined by immunolabelling for alpha-s...

From Durham to Delhi: "Medical Tourism" and the Global Economy Friday, 08 June 2007 12:15–1:30 pm 3-100 Mayo University of Minnesota Campus Twin Cities, MN Presented by: Leigh Turner, PhD Associate Professor and William Dawson Scholar in the Biomedical Ethics Unit and Department of Social Studies of Medicine, McGill University Orthopaedic surgery, cardiac care, dental surgery, and other procedures are all available for purchase in the global health services marketplace. Americans unable to afford health care in the United States are arranging treatment in India, Singapore, Thailand, and other countries. Proponents of "medical tourism" argue that a global market in health services will promote consumer choice, foster competition among hospitals, and reduce the cost of health care in the United States. Sceptics raise concerns about patient safety, information disclosure to patients, quality of care, and liability issues. A global market in health services will hav...

Lam JY, Freeman MK, & Gates ME. Modafinil augmentation for residual symptoms of fatigue in patients with a partial response to antidepressants. Annals of Pharmacotherapy. 2007 Jun;41(6):1005-12. Epub 2007 May 22. University of Alabama Health System-Birmingham, Birmingham, AL, USA. OBJECTIVE: To evaluate the literature discussing the use of modafinil in the treatment of residual symptoms of fatigue in patients with depression. DATA SOURCES: PubMed (1966-March 2007) and International Pharmaceutical Abstracts (1970-March 2007) were searched using the key words modafinil and depression. A manual search of the reference section of the articles retrieved was conducted to identify articles not indexed in either of these sources. STUDY SELECTION AND DATA EXTRACTION: All articles published in English were evaluated. Studies were included if modafinil was used to treat patients with residual fatigue from depression and the effects were measured with validated fatigue subscales. DATA SYNTHE...

From today's New York Times : Forgetting May Be Part of the Process of Remembering By BENEDICT CAREY June 5, 2007 Whether drawing a mental blank on a new A.T.M. password, a favorite recipe or an old boyfriend, people have ample opportunity every day to curse their own forgetfulness. But forgetting is also a blessing, and researchers reported on Sunday that the ability to block certain memories reduces the demands on the brain when it is trying to recall something important. The study, appearing in the journal Nature Neuroscience, is the first to record visual images of people’s brains as they suppress distracting memories. The more efficiently that study participants were tuning out irrelevant words during a word-memorization test, the sharper the drop in activity in areas of their brains involved in recollection. Accurate remembering became easier, in terms of the energy required. Blocking out a distracting memory is something like ignoring an old (and perhaps distracting) acquai...

Polanczyk G, de Lima MS, Horta BL, Biederman J, & Rohde LA. The Worldwide Prevalence of ADHD: A Systematic Review and Metaregression Analysis . American Journal of Psychiatry. 2007 Jun; 164(6): 942-948. Child and Adolescent Psychiatric Division, Hospital de Clinicas de Porto Alegre, Rua Ramiro Barcelos, 2350, Porto Alegre, RS, Brazil 90035-003. OBJECTIVE: The worldwide prevalence estimates of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)/hyperkinetic disorder (HD) are highly heterogeneous. Presently, the reasons for this discrepancy remain poorly understood. The purpose of this study was to determine the possible causes of the varied worldwide estimates of the disorder and to compute its worldwide-pooled prevalence. METHOD: The authors searched MEDLINE and PsycINFO databases from January 1978 to December 2005 and reviewed textbooks and reference lists of the studies selected. Authors of relevant articles from North America, South America, Europe, Africa, Asia, Oceania, and the M...

From the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation : Are cellphones and the internet rewiring our brains? May 21, 2007 By Sabrina Saccoccio, CBC News Try reading this article to the end without checking e-mail. Find you can't? Before making assumptions of addictive behaviour, you should know there's a positive side to switching tasks often. You may actually be training your brain to become faster and stronger. Studies are beginning to show that cellphone-toting execs and Facebook-friendly teens may be multi-tasking their way into taking on even more, by rewiring their brains to handle it. The action of using a cellphone or e-mail has an immediate effect on the brain. Answering calls and thumbing texts prepares the human brain to take on such tasks — because its circuitry adapts to the environment it's presented with. "People will often ask me, 'Are kids today different to kids 20 years ago?' Well, yes, they are. Because the world is different, their brains have wired u...

Picked up a nice-looking new book this afternoon, the first issue of a planned yearly anthology by The Dana Foundation: Cerebrum 2007 , with a foreward by Bruce McEwen. The softcover book includes more than a dozen contributions on neuroscience topics ranging from stroke prevention to neuroimaging biomarkers in drug development.

The Memory Experience : Improve, share, and understand.

Dixon RA, Garrett DD, Lentz TL, MacDonald SW, Strauss E, & Hultsch DF. Neurocognitive markers of cognitive impairment: Exploring the roles of speed and inconsistency. Neuropsychology; 2007 May; 21(3): 381-399. Department of Psychology, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. A well-known challenge for research in the cognitive neuropsychology of aging is to distinguish between the deficits and changes associated with normal aging and those indicative of early cognitive impairment. In a series of 2 studies, the authors explored whether 2 neurocognitive markers, speed (mean level) and inconsistency (intraindividual variability), distinguished between age groups (64-73 and 74-90+ years) and cognitive status groups (nonimpaired, mildly impaired, and moderately impaired). Study 1 (n = 416) showed that both level and inconsistency distinguished between the age and 2 cognitive status (not impaired, mildly impaired) groups, with a modest tendency for inconsistency to predict gr...

Al Gore brings in a fair smattering of neuroscience in his excellent new book, especially in a chapter about the politics of fear. [photograph by anthony risser, copyright 2007.]

From the June 2007 APA Monitor : A long road back With so many service members affected by traumatic brain injuries, neuropsychologists are ramping up diagnosis and treatment By Christopher Munsey Monitor staff Print version: page 34 Traumatic brain injury (TBI) has been called the "signature injury" of the Iraq war. Most commonly, the injuries are caused by improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, the makeshift bombs insurgents frequently use to attack U.S. forces. Even if soldiers are not directly hit, the shockwaves of these explosions can violently shake their brains or send shrapnel into their helmets. The result is often an injury that's much like a boxer hit with a knock-out punch. Thanks to excellent medical care and advanced body armor, service members are surviving injuries that would have killed them in previous wars. But with that survival often comes brain damage, a decrease in cognitive abilities and a lessening of emotional self-regulation. Psychologists, par...