Neuroscience News

A newly available DNA-based prenatal blood test that can identify a pregnancy with Down syndrome can also identify two additional chromosome abnormalities: trisomy 18 (Edwards syndrome) and trisomy 13 (Patau syndrome).The test for all three defects can be offered as early as 10 weeks of pregnancy to women who have been identified as being at [...]

New research reveals how the brain appears to adapt to compensate for the effects of long-term ADHD medication, suggesting why ADHD medication is more effective short-term than it is long-term . The study, from the Institute of Psychiatry (IoP) at King’s College London is published today in the American Journal of Psychiatry . Dr Paolo Fusar-Poli and Professor Katya [...]

Mental illness suspect genes are among the most environmentally responsive. For the first time, scientists have tracked the activity, across the lifespan, of an environmentally responsive regulatory mechanism that turns genes on and off in the brain’s executive hub. Among key findings of the study by National Institutes of Health scientists: genes implicated in schizophrenia and [...]

The same gene mutations linked to inherited, early-onset Alzheimer’s disease have been found in people with the more common late-onset form of the illness. The discovery by researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis may lead doctors and researchers to change the way Alzheimer’s disease is classified. They report their findings Feb. 1 [...]

New research from Uppsala University shows that a specific brain region linked to appetite regulation is reduced in elderly people who are obese. Poor eating habits over a lifetime may therefore weaken brain function that helps us to control our desire to eat. The findings are published in The International Journal of Obesity. Researchers Samantha Brooks [...]

Mouse skin cells can be converted directly into cells that become the three main parts of the nervous system, according to researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine. The finding is an extension of a previous study by the same group showing that mouse and human skin cells can be directly converted into functional neurons. [...]

Neuroscientists may one day be able to hear the imagined speech of a patient unable to speak due to stroke or paralysis, according to University of California, Berkeley, researchers. These scientists have succeeded in decoding electrical activity in the brain’s temporal lobe – the seat of the auditory system – as a person listens to normal [...]

Hyperconnectivity triggered by loss of PTEN gene can be blocked by treatment with rapamycin. New research from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) might help explain how a gene mutation found in some autistic individuals leads to difficulties in processing auditory cues and paying spatial attention to sound. The study has found that when a suspected autism [...]

Scientists have now discovered how different brain regions cooperate during short-term memory. Holding information within one’s memory for a short while is a seemingly simple and everyday task. We use our short-term memory when remembering a new telephone number if there is nothing to write at hand, or to find the beautiful dress inside the store [...]

School-age children whose mothers nurtured them early in life have brains with a larger hippocampus, a key structure important to learning, memory and response to stress. The new research, by child psychiatrists and neuroscientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, is the first to show that changes in this critical region of children’s [...]

Canadian-led research team identifies two mutations in crucial gene involved in deadly pediatric brain tumours. An international research team led by the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre (RI MUHC) has made a major genetic breakthrough that could change the way pediatric cancers are treated in the future. The researchers identified two genetic mutations [...]

New location of critical area provides hints on origin of language. Scientists have long believed that human speech is processed towards the back of the brain’s cerebral cortex, behind auditory cortex where all sounds are received — a place famously known as Wernicke’s area after the German neurologist who proposed this site in the late 1800s [...]

Researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center have developed what they believe to be the first clinical application of a new imaging technique to diagnose brain tumors. The unique test could preclude the need for surgery in patients whose tumors are located in areas of the brain too dangerous to biopsy. This new magnetic resonance spectroscopy [...]

Stowers researchers discovered that a prion-like protein plays a key role in storing long-term memories. Memories in our brains are maintained by connections between neurons called “synapses”. But how do these synapses stay strong and keep memories alive for decades? Neuroscientists at the Stowers Institute for Medical Research have discovered a major clue from a study [...]

In their first year of life, babies who will go on to develop autism already show different brain responses when someone looks at or away from them. Although the researchers are careful to say that the study, reported online on January 26 in the Cell Press journal Current Biology , is only a first step toward earlier diagnosis, [...]

Chemists have taken an important step in making artificial life forms from scratch. Using a novel chemical reaction, they have created self-assembling cell membranes, the structural envelopes that contain and support the reactions required for life. Neal Devaraj, assistant professor of chemistry at the University of California, San Diego, and Itay Budin, a graduate student [...]