BOSTON—Although more children today are surviving cancer than ever before, young patients successfully treated in the 1970s and 80s may live a decade less, on average, than the general population, according to a study from Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and the Harvard School of Public Health.
Brain
A new study from the Swedish medical university Karolinska Institutet provides evidence that basic human learning systems use areas of the brain that also exist in the most primitive vertebrates, such as certain fish, reptiles and amphibians. The study involved an investigation into the limbic striatum, one of the evolutionarily oldest parts of the brain, and the ability to learn movements, consciously and unconsciously, through repetition.
The metal components used in the hinges of spectacle frames, surgical instruments or artificial heart valves are often very small. For some years now, manufacturers of components with complex geometries of this type have relied on a special production process: metal injection molding. Things can occasionally go awry during production, and then it is often impossible to detect defects until after sintering, the final step in the process chain, by which time it is too late to correct the defect.
April 6, 2010 (Philadelphia, PA) -- Src (short for sarcoma) is a family of proto-oncogenic tyrosine kinases active in many cancer tumors, including medulloblastoma, the most common malignant cancer in children. Src represents one of the most promising targets for cancer therapy.
The students in Beghetto's study were drawn from a large group of elementary-aged schoolchildren who were receiving marine science instruction from teachers working with UO graduate students in the National Science Foundation-funded Graduate Teaching Fellows in K-12 Education Program, led by biologists Alan Shanks and Jan Hodder, at the UO's Institute of Marine Biology in Charleston, Ore.
Depression and schizophrenia can be triggered by environmental stimuli and often occur in response to stressful life events. However, some people have a higher predisposition to develop these diseases, which highlights a role for genetics in determining a person's disease risk. A high number of people with depression have a genetic change that alters a protein that cells use to talk to each other in the brain. Imaging of people with depression also shows that they have greater activity in some areas of their brain.
- Children with a fetal alcohol spectrum disorder (FASD) can suffer from many developmental problems.
- New findings show a very high prevalence of epilepsy/seizures in the FASD population.
- First-trimester drinking, and drinking during all three trimesters, were the predominant forms of fetal alcohol exposure.
- Childhood sleep problems are relatively common in the U.S.
- A new study has found that individuals with troubles sleeping during childhood and adolescence, as well as poor response inhibition during adolescence, have subsequent substance use and substance-related problems during young adulthood.
Exercise is a magic drug for many people with depression and anxiety disorders, and it should be more widely prescribed by mental health care providers, according to researchers who analyzed the results of numerous published studies.
"Exercise has been shown to have tremendous benefits for mental health," says Jasper Smits, director of the Anxiety Research and Treatment Program at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. "The more therapists who are trained in exercise therapy, the better off patients will be."
Your brain's capacity for information is a reliable predictor of Alzheimer's disease and can be cheaply and easily tested, according to scientists.
"We have developed a low-cost behavioral assessment that can clue someone in to Alzheimer's disease at its earliest stage," said Michael Wenger, associate professor of psychology, Penn State. "By examining (information) processing capacity, we can detect changes in the progression of mild cognitive impairment (MCI)."
Motorcycle riders across the country are growing older, and the impact of this trend is evident in emergency rooms daily. Doctors are finding that these aging road warriors are more likely to be injured or die as a result of a motorcycle mishap compared to their younger counterparts.
The brain is capable of holding and retrieving memories for specific fears, revealing a more sophisticated storage and recall capacity than previously thought, neuroscientists have found. The study, which appears in the journal Nature Neuroscience, may have implications for treating post-traumatic stress syndrome—as scientists begin to understand how different fears are stored in the brain, they can move toward addressing specific fear memories.
NEW YORK, NY (April 2) - New York Stem Cell Foundation (NYSCF) Fellow, Christopher Fasano, PhD, of the New York Neural Stem Cell Institute, is lead author on a study that investigating human neural development. Dr. Fasano conducted this work while working as a post-doctoral fellow at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in the lab of Dr. Lorenz Studer. Dr. Fasano and his colleagues used human embryonic stem cells (hESC) to derive floor plate tissue, an important signaling center during brain development.
Some current therapies being investigated for Alzheimer's disease may cause further neural degeneration and cell death, according to a breakthrough discovery by UC San Diego researchers. By combining three dimensional computer simulations with high resolution atomic force microscopy membrane protein and cell imaging, electrical recording and various cellular assays, UCSD nano-biophysicist Ratnesh Lal and his colleagues investigated the structure and function of truncated peptides, known as nonamyloidgenic peptides, formed by some Alzheimer's drug candidates.
LA JOLLA, CA—There is strength in numbers if you want to get your voice heard. But how to do you get your say if you are in the minority? That's a dilemma faced not only by the citizens of a democracy but also by some neurons in the brain.
Although they only account for a fraction of the synapses in the visual cortex, neurons in the thalamus get their message across loud and clear by coordination -- simultaneously hitting the "send" button—according to a computer simulation developed by researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies.