BrainBlog

Sarah Polley's movie won a Canadian film award this weekend: From the CBC : Polley's film big winner at Director's Guild Awards Last Updated: Sunday, September 30, 2007 | 9:38 AM ET The Canadian Press Sarah Polley's poignant Away From Her was the big winner at the 2007 Directors Guild of Canada Awards on Saturday. The film was honoured as best picture, and Polley was named best director; her husband, David Wharnsby, won the prize for best picture editing. The critically acclaimed movie chronicles the intrusion of Alzheimer's disease into the lives of an aging couple, played by Gordon Pinsent and Julie Christie. [ ... Read the full article ... ] Read my earlier post about this movie here .

Scientific American has created a courtesy weekly podcast to highlight research about the brain and behavior. The podcast can be accessed at this webpage: Scientific American webpage . Not a bad way to spend a minute! Which, by the way, reminds me to mention that if you are in Philadelphia, the University of Pennsylvania still has several of its outdoors 60-second lectures remaining over the next few weeks, which are always fun to attend!

Available in a .pdf document from the "What's New" page of the OIG website here: Link for OIG webpage .

Yesterday's Wall Street Journal ran a feature article about neuroscientist Donald Stein and his career exploring facets of recovery from traumatic brain injury (TBI): One Doctor's Lonely Quest To Heal Brain Injury After 40 Years, Skeptics Back Hormone Therapy; Experiments in a Trailer By THOMAS M. BURTON September 26, 2007; Page A1 [snip] Dr. Stein still wanted to figure out why those brain-injured rats seemed to recover. But he says he concluded that he wouldn't win tenure if he pursued the question. In 1966, with a wife and young child to support, he left MIT to take a job as a psychology professor and director of the brain-research lab at Clark University in Worcester, Mass. His growing interest in the possibility of recovery from brain injury put him in a tiny minority. Most neurologists at the time still agreed with Nobel laureate Santiago Ramón y Cajal , who wrote in 1913, "In the adult brain, nervous pathways are fixed and immutable. Everything may die, nothin...

From a National Institutes of Health (NIH) press release on the 26th: Scientists Suggest New Pathway Causing Cell Death in Dementia Scientists have discovered a link between a mutated gene and a protein found in dead brain cells of people who suffer from a form of dementia and other neurological disorders. The finding, reported in the Sep. 26, 2007, issue of the Journal of Neuroscience , demonstrates for the first time a pathological pathway that ultimately results in cell death related to frontotemporal dementia (FTD) and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease). The discovery could eventually play a role in the design of new drug therapies. The study was funded by the National Institute on Aging (NIA) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Leonard Petrucelli, Ph.D., and Dennis W. Dickson, M.D, of the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Fla., led the international team of scientists in the study supported by the Mayo Clinic Foundation. The study, in ce...

Diamond EL, Miller S, Dickerson BC, Atri A, Depeau K, Fenstermacher E, Pihlajamäki M, Celone K, Salisbury S, Gregas M, Rentz D, & Sperling RA. Relationship of fMRI activation to clinical trial memory measures in Alzheimer disease. Neurology. 2007 Sep 25; 69(13): 1331-1341. Memory Disorders Unit, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, 221 Longwood Ave, Boston, MA 02115 BACKGROUND: Functional MRI (fMRI) has shown promise as a tool to characterize altered brain function in Alzheimer disease (AD) and for use in proof of concept clinical trials. FMRI studies of subjects with AD have demonstrated altered hippocampal and neocortical activation while encoding novel stimuli compared to older controls. However, the relationship between fMRI activation and performance on standardized clinical trial memory measures has not been fully investigated. OBJECTIVE: To determine whether patterns of activation during an associative-memory fMRI paradigm correlate with performance on memory measures used in A...

Congratulations to Yoky Matsuoka for becoming a MacArthur Fellow. She is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington, Seattle. Read about her work in rehabilitation neurorobotics .

From Australia's National Nine News: Alzheimer's struggle brought to screen Friday Sep 21 08:19 AEST At just 28 years of age, Canadian director Sarah Polley has made a debut feature film that directors twice her age and experience would be proud of. Also a talented actress, she is best known to Australian audiences for her acting roles as a supermarket checkout chick in the 1999 crime thriller Go and a schoolgirl in Atom Egoyan's The Sweet Hereafter. For her directorial debut, Away From Her , Polley chose to tell the story of a couple in their 60s who are dealing with Alzheimer's disease. It is hardly a film you would expect a 20-something film-maker to produce. The fact that she convinced Oscar winners Julie Christie and Olympia Dukakis to be part of the movie is even more impressive. "During rehearsals, all of a sudden it dawned on me that I was directing people who were twice my age, and who had a good deal more experience than I did, and who were actors that ...

From the current issue of The New Yorker : The Abyss Music and amnesia by Oliver Sacks September 24, 2007 The experience of Clive Wearing and his spouse, Deborah. [ ... Read the article ... ]

van de Sandt-Koenderman WM, Wiegers J, Wielaert SM, Duivenvoorden HJ, & Ribbers GM. A computerised communication aid in severe aphasia: An exploratory study. Disability and Rehabilitation. 2007 Apr 30;:1-9 [Epub ahead of print]. Rijndam Rehabilitation Center, Rotterdam. Purpose. To investigate the efficacy of TouchSpeak (TS) , a handheld computerised communication aid for aphasia. Method. A pre-post one-group design was used with a referred sample of 34 patients with a severe aphasia and a need for alternative and augmentative communication (AAC). The participants were trained to use TS in two self-chosen communicative situations. The ability to navigate the hierarchical vocabulary and overall communicative ability were assessed. Participants rated their communicative success with and without TS. Three years after completion of the training, participants were interviewed about their present use of TS. Results. In total, 76% used TS outside the clinic in two trained communicative ...

This weekend I crack open the files on my next book and begin work on it, which I plan to complete by the end of 2008. This will be a weekend and vacation-time effort, which is the only way I can fit it in. I've co-authored three academic books in the past and written a number of general-readership articles, but this will be my first venture into a book-length work written for a more general audience. The closest I've come to this in the past was a monograph (monograph:book as novella: novel) on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) waaaay back in 1984, so I'm looking forward to the task! The topic is on my area of expertise: the neuropsychological assessment of persons and what we can learn from these tests about the brain-behavior functioning of individuals.

Ackermann H, Mathiak K, & Riecker A. The contribution of the cerebellum to speech production and speech perception: Clinical and functional imaging data. Cerebellum. 2007; 6(3): 202-13. Department of General Neurology, Hertie Institute for Clinical Brain Research, University of Tübingen. A classical tenet of clinical neurology proposes that cerebellar disorders may give rise to speech motor disorders (ataxic dysarthria), but spare perceptual and cognitive aspects of verbal communication. During the past two decades, however, a variety of higher-order deficits of speech production, e.g., more or less exclusive agrammatism, amnesic or transcortical motor aphasia, have been noted in patients with vascular cerebellar lesions, and transient mutism following resection of posterior fossa tumors in children may develop into similar constellations. Perfusion studies provided evidence for cerebello-cerebral diaschisis as a possible pathomechanism in these instances. Tight functional conne...

Nathan PC, Patel SK, Dilley K, Goldsby R, Harvey J, Jacobsen C, Kadan-Lottick N, McKinley K, Millham AK, Moore I, Okcu MF, Woodman CL, Brouwers P, Armstrong FD; Children's Oncology Group Long-term Follow-up Guidelines Task Force on Neurocognitive/Behavioral Complications After Childhood Cancer. Guidelines for identification of, advocacy for, and intervention in neurocognitive problems in survivors of childhood cancer: A report from the Children's Oncology Group. Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine . 2007 Aug; 161(8): 798-806. Division of Haematology/Oncology, The Hospital for Sick Children, 555 University Ave, Toronto, ON M5G 1X8, Canada. With modern therapies and supportive care, survival of childhood cancer has increased considerably. Patients who have survived cancers involving the central nervous system or who have received therapy toxic to the developing brain are at risk of long-term neurocognitive sequelae. Negative outcomes are observed most frequently in su...

The Healthy Brain Initiative website. From the website: [snip] "The lack of cognitive health – from mild cognitive decline to dementia—can have profound implications for an individual’s health and well-being. Older adults and others experiencing cognitive decline may be unable to care for themselves or to conduct necessary activities of daily living, such as meal preparation and money management. Limitations in the ability to effectively manage medications and existing medical conditions are of particular concern when an individual is experiencing cognitive decline or dementia. If cognitive decline could be prevented or better treated, lives of many older adults could be improved. "Opportunities for maintaining cognitive health are growing as public health professionals gain a better understanding of risk factors for cognitive decline. The public health community should embrace cognitive health as a priority, invest in its promotion, and enhance our ability to move scientifi...

BrainBlog turns three years old today.

Vogels RL, Oosterman JM, van Harten B, Scheltens P, van der Flier WM, Schroeder-Tanka JM, & Weinstein HC. Profile of Cognitive Impairment in Chronic Heart Failure. Journal of the American Geriatrics Society. 2007 Aug 28; [Epub ahead of print]. Department of Neurology, Sint Lucas-Andreas Hospital , Amsterdam, The Netherlands. OBJECTIVES: To determine the frequency and pattern of cognitive dysfunction in outpatients with chronic congestive heart failure (CHF) and to identify the corresponding demographic and clinical correlates. DESIGN: Case-control study. SETTING: Outpatient clinic in a community hospital. PARTICIPANTS: Sixty-two outpatients with CHF, 53 controls diagnosed with cardiovascular disease uncomplicated by CHF (cardiac controls), and 42 healthy controls were investigated. MEASUREMENTS: Neuropsychological assessment included tests of mental speed, executive function, memory, language, and visuospatial function. Composite z-scores for five cognitive domains and mean z-sco...

Interesting piece in today's New York Times about writers taking promotional book "tours" via blogs: The Author Will Take Q.’s Now By KARA JESELLA Published: September 2, 2007 [snip] Bloggers have written about books since, well, the beginning of blogging. But a blog book tour usually requires an author or publicist to take the initiative, reaching out to bloggers as if they were booksellers and asking them to be the host for a writer’s online visit. Sometimes bloggers invite authors on their own. In an age of budget-conscious publishers and readers who are as likely to discover books from a Google search as from browsing at a bookstore, the blog book tour makes sense. Although a few high-profile authors have had their books sent to bloggers — James Patterson recently promoted a young-adult book this way — most of the authors are lesser-known and less likely to be reviewed in the mainstream press. [snip] [ Read the full article ... ]

From yesterday's Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel : Lost in cancer's fog 'Chemobrain' impairs thinking, memory after chemotherapy; anecdotal brain effects are just starting to get serious study By JOHN FAUBER 01 September 2007 Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel [snip] In two small groups of testicular and breast cancer patients, between 60% and 70% of the patients experienced some cognitive decline that was tied to the onset of their chemotherapy, said Christina Meyers, a professor and chief of neuropsychology at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. "It's subtle," she said. "We are not talking about dementia or anything grossly obvious." Within one year, about half of the patients were back to their pretreatment levels of cognitive ability, Meyers said. [snip] [ ... Read the full article ... ]