August 11, 2009, New York, NY—A new study by researchers at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health's Center for Infection and Immunity indicates that pediatric obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), Tourette syndrome and/or tic disorder may develop from an inappropriate immune response to the bacteria causing common throat infections.
Brain
(Boston) – Researchers from Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) have found that individuals who have a long history of alcoholism, but who have been abstinent for at least a month up to many years, showed abnormal brain activity when looking at facial expressions of others. The findings, which appear in the August 11 issue of Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research, confirms that alcoholics suffer from abnormalities in parts of the brain that control emotional perception and memory.
Language networks are small-world and scale-free, although they are built based on different principles. Similar global statistical properties shown by language networks are independent of linguistic structure and typology. So, do linguistic structures really influence the statistical properties of a language network? More concretely, does semantic or conceptual network have the same properties as a syntactic one?
Men are far more interested in casual sex than women. While men need to be exceptionally attractive to tempt women to consider casual sex, men are far less choosy. These findings by Dr Achim Schützwohl, from the Department of Psychology at Brunel University in the UK, and his team are published online in Springer's journal Human Nature.
Although depression is the mental disorder that most people associate with suicidal behavior, a new study reveals that a wide range of mental disorders increase the odds of thinking about suicide and making suicide attempts. Whereas depression is indeed one of the strongest predictors of suicidal thoughts across many different countries, it is disorders characterized by anxiety and poor impulse-control that best predict which people act on such thoughts—especially in developing countries, says a multi-country study published in this week's open access journal PLoS Medicine.
A study published this week in the open access journal PLoS Medicine demonstrates that there is an association between schizophrenia and violence, but shows that this association is greatly increased by drug and alcohol abuse.
CHICAGO --- Schizophrenia waits silently until a seemingly normal child becomes a teenager or young adult. Then it swoops down and derails a young life.
Scientists have not understood what causes the severe mental disorder, which affects up to 1 percent of the population and results in hallucinations, memory loss and social withdrawal.
ST. PAUL, Minn. –Areas of brain damage seen on brain scans and originally thought to be related to stroke may help doctors predict a person's risk of memory problems in old age, according to research published in the August 11, 2009, print issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.
At least one strain of the H5N1 avian influenza virus leaves survivors at significantly increased risk for Parkinson's disease and possibly other neurological problems later in life, according to new research from St. Jude Children's Research Hospital.
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. -- A researcher at The Florida State University has been awarded a $5 million, five-year federal grant to train doctoral students to conduct advanced research on the best ways of teaching reading, math and science to the nation's schoolchildren.
Like clockwork, brain regions in many songbird species expand and shrink seasonally in response to hormones. Now, for the first time, University of Washington neurobiologists have interrupted this natural "annual remodeling" of the brain and have shown that there is a direct link between the death of old neurons and their replacement by newly born ones in a living vertebrate.
PHILADELPHIA – A new class of molecules capable of blocking the formation of specific protein clumps that are believed to contribute to Alzheimer's disease pathology has been discovered by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. By assaying close to 300,000 compounds, they have identified drug-like inhibitors of AD tau protein clumping, as reported in the journal Biochemistry.
BOSTON (August 10, 2009) — In a study published online in advance of print in Stem Cells, Tufts researchers report that the STAT3 gene regulates cancer stem cells in brain cancer. Cancer stem cells have many characteristics of stem cells and are thought to be the cells that drive tumor formation. The researchers report that STAT3 could become a target for cancer therapy, specifically in Glioblastoma multiforme (GBM), a type of malignant and aggressive brain tumor.
ANN ARBOR, Mich. – Acupuncture has been used in East-Asian medicine for thousands of years to treat pain, possibly by activating the body's natural painkillers. But how it works at the cellular level is largely unknown.
Using brain imaging, a University of Michigan study is the first to provide evidence that traditional Chinese acupuncture affects the brain's long-term ability to regulate pain.
The results appear online ahead of print in the September Journal of NeuroImage.
The more empathy one has for another, the lighter the accent will be when speaking in a second language. This is the conclusion of a new study carried out at the University of Haifa by Dr. Raphiq Ibrahim and Dr. Mark Leikin of the Department of Learning Disabilities and Prof. Zohar Eviatar of the Department of Psychology at the University of Haifa. The study has been published in the International Journal of Bilingualism.