BrainBlog

Schacter DL, Slotnick SD. The cognitive neuroscience of memory distortion. Neuron. 2004 Sep 30;44(1):149-60. Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138 USA. Memory distortion occurs in the laboratory and in everyday life. This article focuses on false recognition, a common type of memory distortion in which individuals incorrectly claim to have encountered a novel object or event. By considering evidence from neuropsychology, neuroimaging, and electrophysiology, we address three questions. (1) Are there patterns of neural activity that can distinguish between true and false recognition? (2) Which brain regions contribute to false recognition? (3) Which brain regions play a role in monitoring or reducing false recognition? Neuroimaging and electrophysiological studies suggest that sensory activity is greater for true recognition compared to false recognition. Neuropsychological and neuroimaging results indicate that the hippocampus and several cortical re...

A press release from the Radiological Society of North America. Here is the abstract of the specific study mentioned in the release: [ abstract ]. MR imaging during brain surgery improves tumor removal OAK BROOK, Ill. - A specially adapted magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner can help physicians remove brain tumors and all of the residual cancer during one surgical procedure, according to a study published in the October issue of the journal Radiology. Using intraoperative MR-guidance, surgical strategy was changed in one out of four cases. "Imaging during surgery provides intraoperative quality control. It presents valuable information during the procedure that allows the surgeon an opportunity to adjust the strategy," said lead author Christopher Nimsky, M.D., an associate professor at the University Erlangen-Nürnberg in Germany. Prior to intraoperative imaging, small parts of the tumor could be inadvertently missed. This tumor residue usually requ...

A company press release concerning an agreement to develop additional research efforts in the search for pharmaceutical treatments for brain tumors: CombinatoRx and ABC2 Initiate Brain Cancer Collaboration: Partnership Speeds Search for Brain Cancer Cure Monday September 27, 8:33 am ET BOSTON and BURLINGAME, Calif., Sept. 27 /PRNewswire/ -- CombinatoRx, Incorporated, a privately held pharmaceutical company, and Accelerate Brain Cancer Cure (ABC2), a non-profit foundation dedicated to accelerating therapies leading to a cure for brain cancer, today announced that they have initiated a research collaboration aimed at identifying novel multi-target drugs for the treatment of brain cancer. The sponsored research will leverage the CombinatoRx proprietary combination high throughput screening (cHTS) platform in an effort to discover novel drug combinations that hit multiple targets relevant to glioblastoma multiforme (GBM), a deadly form of brain cancer. The cHTS platform allows...

A company press release regarding a treatment for brain tumors: Guilford Pharmaceuticals Announces Orphan Drug Designation for GLIADEL(R) Wafer; Market Exclusivity for GLIADEL(R) Extends Until 2010 BALTIMORE, Sept. 27 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Guilford Pharmaceuticals Inc. (Nasdaq: GLFD) today announced that it has received notice from the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) that GLIADEL(R) Wafer (polifeprosan 20 with carmustine implant), the Company's proprietary brain cancer treatment, is entitled to seven years of market exclusivity for the treatment of patients with malignant glioma undergoing primary surgical resection. The seven-year period of exclusivity under the Orphan Drug Act commenced on the date of approval in February 2003 and extends until February 2010. The FDA's orphan drug program is intended to encourage research, development and approval of products for diseases that affect fewer than 200,000 patients in the United States per year an...

Here are some relevant highlights from this week’s major scientific and medical weeklies: Journal of the American Medical Association 22/29 September 2004 There are several contributions this week examining dietary intake and physical exercise habits in aging populations and their relationship to cognitive functioning and dementia. The issue also contains an editorial about these contributions. New England Journal of Medicine 23 September 2004 This issue includes a Clinical Practice case vignette about Bell’s Palsy by Gilden. Lancet 25 September 2004 This week’s Lancet includes a comment entitled, Parkinson's disease and dementia with Lewy bodies: A difference in dose? and two research letters on the topic of Parkinson’s: alpha-synuclein locus duplication as a cause of familial Parkinson's disease by Chartier-Harlin and colleagues and Causal relation between alpha-synuclein gene duplication and familial Parkinson's disease by Ibáñez an...

A small but fascinating area of study in neuropsychology is the examination of the abilities of artists who have sustained some form or another of brain disease. Painters, musicians, writers have all been studied, usually in detailed individual case studies. Changes as a result of progressive disorders (e.g., Alzheimer disease) or as a result of an acute event (e.g., stroke) have been examined, as well as the artistic productions of nonprofessionals (e.g., autistic children). A new review article is available that discusses this work in detail. The article and its author are discussed in this press release from the University of Pennsylvania: September 21, 2004 Artistic Expression Need Not End, and Can Even Improve After Brain Damage Penn Researcher Finds Neuropsychological Processes Offer Insights into Artistic Production ...

This corporate press release on BusinessWire about a drug candidate for treatment of primary brain tumors: Ecopia's Lead Cancer Compound Shown to Cross Blood-Brain Barrier September 23, 2004 08:26 AM US Eastern Timezone MONTREAL--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sept. 23, 2004--Ecopia BioSciences Inc. (TSX:EIA) has obtained results demonstrating that its lead compound ECO-4601, a drug candidate to treat brain cancer, crosses the blood-brain barrier. This new data, coupled with previous efficacy data in glioma animal models as well as the compound's safety profile, reinforces the Company's strategy to pursue the development of ECO-4601 for treatment of primary brain cancer. This will allow Ecopia to rapidly access an underserved and growing market of patients with a very bleak prognosis. Current treatment options for primary brain cancer are limited and often present challenges in delivering the drug to its target, which...

A report at Science Daily concerning a new research study: New Way To Protect Brain From Stroke Damage Researchers have uncovered a new culprit behind the brain injury suffered by stroke victims. Their new study, published in the Sept. 17 issue of Cell, links brain cell damage to a rise in brain acidity following the oxygen depletion, or ischemia, characteristic of stroke. The results may lead to new therapies designed to avert the often debilitating effects of stroke, for which successful treatments are currently lacking, the researchers said. A series of experiments in laboratory dishes and in animals implicates a recently described class of membrane ion channels, called acid-sensing ion channels (ASICs), to the influx of calcium in nerve cells starved of oxygen and subjected to acidic conditions. That calcium overload, long attributed to another group of cellular components, is essential for stroke injury as it sets off a cascade of events toxic to cells, said neurophysiol...

A curious report from New Scientist : Rats' brain waves could find trapped people 19:00 22 September 04 Rats equipped with radios that transmit their brainwaves could soon be helping to locate earthquake survivors buried in the wreckage of collapsed buildings. Rats have an exquisitely sensitive sense of smell and can crawl just about anywhere. This combination makes them ideal candidates for sniffing out buried survivors. For that, the animals need to be taught to home in on people, and they must also signal their position to rescuers on the surface. In a project funded by DARPA, the Pentagon’s research arm, Linda and Ray Hermer-Vazquez of the University of Florida in Gainesville have worked out a way to achieve this. Trained rats reach the places that sniffer dogs cannot First the researchers identified the neural signals rats generate when they have found a scent that they are looking for. “When a dog is sniffing a bomb, he makes a unique movement that the...

This week's issue of JAMA is getting a good deal of media attention for several articles that assess dietary intake and exercise habits and their impact on cognitive functioning and dementia in older indviduals. Following is the abstract one of the reports. This study is also important in neuropsychology as it is part of the Nurses' Health Study, which is a large scale study of aging that includes telephone-based cognitive assessments. Jennifer Weuve, ScD; Jae Hee Kang, ScD; JoAnn E. Manson, MD; Monique M. B. Breteler, MD; James H. Ware, PhD; Francine Grodstein, ScD. Physical Activity, Including Walking, and Cognitive Function in Older Women . JAMA.  2004;292:1454-1461. Context:  Physical activity may help maintain cognitive function in older adults. Objective:  To examine the relation of long-term regular physical activity, including walking, to cognitive function. Design:  Women reported participation in leisure-time physical activities on biennial ma...

Garces-Redondo M, Santos S, Perez-Lazaro C, Pascual-Millan LF. The supermarket test: Preliminary normative data in our milieu (in Spanish). Rev Neurol. 2004 Sep 1-15; 39(5): 415-8. Hospital Clinico Universitario Lozano Blesa, Zaragoza, Espana. INTRODUCTION. Semantic verbal fluency (SVF) tests are often used in basic neuropsychological evaluation. They are not time consuming and are easy to apply, but the normative data have been validated mainly for the Anglo-Saxon population, which can lead us to make mistakes in classifying normality. AIMS. To evaluate the category 'things you can buy at a supermarket' as a task for exploring SVF applied to a Castilian-speaking population of Spaniards with the aim of conducting a pilot normative test in our milieu. SUBJECTS AND METHODS. The 'things you can buy at a supermarket' task was applied to a sample of 139 healthy subjects without cognitive impairment, whose mother tongue is Spanish. The subjects were subclassified a...

From a University of Illinois at Chicago press release : World’s Most Powerful MRI for Decoding the Human Brain Newswise — The University of Illinois at Chicago unveiled today the world's most powerful magnetic resonance imaging machine for human studies, capable of imaging not just the anatomy but metabolism within the brain. This advanced technology ushers in a new age of metabolic imaging that will help researchers understand the workings of the human brain, detect diseases before their clinical signs appear, develop targeted drug therapies for illnesses like stroke and provide a better understanding of learning disabilities. Central to the technology is a 9.4-tesla magnet, larger than any other human-sized magnet, built by GE Healthcare, a unit of General Electric Company. A tesla is a large measuring unit of magnetic strength. "This technological leap forward is as revolutionary to the medical community as the transition from radio to television was for so...

An article from the Australian website, The Age: CogState promotes brain tests to draw takeover offers By Rebecca Urban September 22, 2004 Frustrated by its diminishing value on the Australian sharemarket, diagnostic maker CogState is pitching itself to some of the world's leading pharmaceutical companies as a potential takeover target. Just seven months after the company's public listing, chief executive Peter Bick told The Age that he had become impatient with the lack of trading in its shares and selling the business might be the only way to recoup lost value for shareholders. Dr Bick would not confirm which companies he was talking to. But pharmaceutical giants Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson and Lundbeck are believed to be high on the hit-list given they are the only companies worldwide to have Alzheimer's disease drugs approved for the market. CogState's computerised brain test helps diagnose Alzheimer's by alerting doctors to changes ...

James B. Duke professor emeritus dies at 81: Irving Diamond researched brain evolution, structure and function. The Chronicle Online: The Independent Daily at Duke University From Staff and Wire Reports 17 September 2004 Irving Diamond, a retired James B. Duke Professor of Psychology and a prominent researcher in human and animal sensory systems, died Tuesday at his Durham home. He was 81. Diamond, born in Chicago Sept. 17, 1922, received his undergraduate and graduate degrees from the University of Chicago. After serving from 1943 to 1946 in the U.S. Army, Diamond joined the University of Chicago faculty and taught there for a decade before coming to Duke in 1958. “He was an important figure in neuropsychology,” said George Washington Ivey Professor Emeritus of New Testament in the Divinity School Moody Smith, a friend and colleague to Diamond. “He loved intellectual controversy and was always open minded.” The aut...

Targeted therapy knocks out pediatric brain cancer in mice Scientists have identified what may be the first nontoxic treatment for a subset of medulloblastoma, the most common type of malignant pediatric brain tumor. The finding is encouraging in that such precise, targeted therapies may someday replace traditional treatments that can have overwhelmingly negative side effects for pediatric cancer patients. The research is published in the September issue of Cancer Cell. "Therapy for pediatric cancers of the central nervous system has not improved significantly in the last three decades," explains study author Dr. Tom Curran from St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee. "This is partly due to the absence of adequate model systems for testing novel therapies." Dr. Curran and colleagues used a mouse model of medulloblastoma that they had developed to examine whether selective inhibition of the Sonic Hedgehog (Shh) signaling pathway coul...

MIT to name new director of McGovern brain center The Boston Globe By Marcella Bombardieri, Globe Staff  |  September 20, 2004 The McGovern Institute for Brain Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology will announce today that Robert Desimone, scientific director of the National Institute of Mental Health, has been chosen as its new director, according to MIT officials. Desimone will replace Phillip A. Sharp, the Nobel laureate biologist who has led the McGovern Institute since it was created four years ago with a $350 million gift from International Data Group founder Patrick J. McGovern and his wife, Lore Harp McGovern. It was the largest gift ever pledged to a university at the time, and the McGovern Institute is a key part of MIT's efforts to develop the best neuroscience program in the world. [ ... Read the full article ...]

Hart T, Sherer M, Whyte J, Polansky M, Novack TA. Awareness of behavioral, cognitive, and physical deficits in acute traumatic brain injury . Arch Phys Med Rehabil 2004; 85:1450-6. OBJECTIVE: To compare awareness of deficit in 3 domains of function (physical, cognitive, behavioral/emotional) in acute traumatic brain injury (TBI), controlling for severity of impairment in the different domains. DESIGN: Inception cohort. SETTING: Three inpatient rehabilitation programs. PARTICIPANTS: People with acute TBI (N=161), tested as soon as feasible after posttraumatic amnesia. INTERVENTIONS: Not applicable. Main outcome measures Awareness Questionnaire (AQ) completed by the person with TBI and the treating neuropsychologist; and self- and clinician-rating scores calculated in the 3 domains. RESULTS: For participants who were rated by clinicians as more impaired in at least 1 domain (ie, scored lower on the AQ), self-ratings differed significantly from one another in all 3 domains, with behav...

As a follow-up to this week's news about dementia and the voter, I note that the senior author of the JAMA article has a funded project to examine this issue, called the Dementia Voting Project [ project website ]. According to the site's homepage: "Welcome to the Dementia Voting Project. The goal of this project is to identify and address the ethical, legal, political, medical and practical issues regarding the rights and abilities of individuals with dementia and other causes of cognitive impairment to vote." According to the site, some of the questions they are examining include: How should we understand the construct of "the capacity to vote"? How can a person assess another person's "capacity to vote?" What kind of assistance in voting is appropriate to provide to a person with cognitive impairment who retains sufficient residual capacity to cast a meaningful vote...

Au R, Seshadri S, Wolf P, Elias M, Elias P, Sullivan L, Beiser A, D'Agostino R. New norms for a new generation: Cognitive performance in the Framingham Offspring Cohort . Exp Aging Res. 2004 Oct-Dec; 30(4): 333-58. Department of Neurology, Boston University School of Medicine, Boston, Massachusetts, USA. A previous publication presented normative data on neuropsychological tests stratified by age, gender, and education based on the Original Cohort of the Framingham Heart Study. Many contemporary investigations include subject samples with higher levels of education, a factor known to affect cognitive performance. Secular change in education prompted the reexamination of norms in the children of the Original Cohort. The study population consisted of 853 men and 988 women from the Offspring Study, free of clinical neurological disease, who underwent a neuropsychological examination, which included tests given to their parents in 1974 to 1976 as well as additional newer test...

Here are some relevant highlights from the new issues of the major medical and scientific weeklies: Journal of the American Medical Association 15 September 2004 JAMA ’s contents this week include the report about dementia and the voter by Karlawish and colleagues, which has been quite newsworthy (see earlier posts). This issue also includes an editorial concerning pharmaceutical clinical-trials registration: Clinical Trial Registration: A Statement From the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors . British Medical Journal 18 September 2004 This week’s BMJ also publishes the editorial concerning clinical-trials registration. New England Journal of Medicine 16 September 2004 This week’s issue contains a review article about Turner’s Syndrome by Sybert and McCauley. The clinical-trials editorial also appears. Nature 16 September 2004 Includes the letter , Early brain growth in Homo erectus and implications for cognitive ability by Coqueugniot ...