The learning of birdsong resembles the learning of speech in humans. Crucial for the process are acoustic perception and the ability to produce sound. Social isolation leads to a disturbed vocal development both in humans and in birds. When children grow up without contact to other humans they either develop no or a rudimentary form of human language.
Brain
Researchers have identified the locking mechanism that allows some neurons to form synapses to pass along essential information. Mutations of genes that produce a critical cell-adhesion molecule involved in the work were previously linked to autism.
The discovery -- captured with fluorescent imaging of excitatory neurons harvested from rat pups shortly after birth and studied in culture as they continued to develop -- is described in a paper placed online May 18 ahead of formal publication in the open-access journal Neural Development.
A drug currently FDA-approved for use in diabetes shows some protective effects in the brains of patients with relapsing remitting multiple sclerosis, researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago College of Medicine report in a study currently available online in the Journal of Neuroimmunology.
For patients who experience pain and depression, common co-existing conditions, an intervention that included individually tailored antidepressant therapy and a pain self-management program resulted in greater improvement in the symptoms of these conditions than patients who received usual care, according to a study in the May 27 issue of JAMA.
INDIANAPOLIS – Pain, the most common reason for adults to visit a primary care physician, and depression, the most frequent mental complaint requiring a doctor's appointment, occur together as often as half the time.
Researchers from the Indiana University School of Medicine and the Regenstrief Institute report in the May 27 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) that a strategy they developed of closely monitored antidepressant therapy coupled with pain self-management can produce substantial improvements in both depression and pain.
ROCHESTER, Minn. -- Patients living with migraine have strong reason for new optimism concerning a positive future. Two review articles and an accompanying editorial, "The Future of Migraine: Beyond Just Another Pill," in the current issue of Mayo Clinic Proceedings, are the basis for an ironic premise.
Washington, DC – Neuroscientists feel they are much closer to an accepted unified theory about how the brain processes speech and language, according to a scientist at Georgetown University Medical Center who first laid the concepts a decade ago and who has now published a review article confirming the theory.
Amsterdam, The Netherlands, May 26, 2009 – There are several risk factors for the development of Alzheimer's disease and vascular dementia. Based on an increasing number of studies linking these risk factors with Vitamin D deficiency, an article in the current issue of the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease (May 2009) by William B. Grant, PhD of the Sunlight, Nutrition, and Health Research Center (SUNARC) suggests that further investigation of possible direct or indirect linkages between Vitamin D and these dementias is needed.
(SACRAMENTO, Calif.) — As thousands of students nationwide prepare to leave high school, a UC Davis study appearing online today in the June issue of the medical journal Pediatrics shows a clear link between attention problems early in school — as early as kindergarten — and lower high school test scores.
UPTON, NY — Parts of the brain involved in monitoring behaviors and emotions show different levels of activity in cocaine users relative to non-drug users, even when both groups perform equally well on a psychological test. These results — from a brain-imaging study conducted at the U.S.
GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Brain may win out over brawn as the primary cause of breathing problems in children with a severe form of muscular dystrophy known as Pompe disease.
Researchers at the Powell Gene Therapy Center at the University of Florida have discovered that signals from the brain to the diaphragm — the muscle that controls breathing — are too weak to initiate healthy respiration in mouse models of the disease.
Packs of hunting dogs, troops of baboons, herds of antelope: when people observe social animals, they are often struck by how intelligent they seem, and recent studies suggest that sociality has played a key role in the evolution of larger brain size among several orders of mammals.
St. Louis, May 25, 2009 — Women of childbearing age can reduce the risk of having a child born with a neural tube defect such as spina bifida by eating enough folate or folic acid. However, folate prevents only about 70 percent of these defects.
New research using mice at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis confirms the importance of another nutrient, inositol, to protect against the development of neural tube defects.
ST. PAUL, Minn. – The largest study of its kind to date shows that women may not be able to learn as well shortly before menopause compared to other stages in life. The research is published in the May 26, 2009, print issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.
For a four-year period, researchers studied 2,362 women, who were between the ages of 42 and 52 had at least one menstrual period in the three months before the study started.
A full third of American adults, 69 million men and women over age 40, are up to 12 times more likely to have a serious fall because they have some form of inner-ear dysfunction that throws them off balance and makes them dizzy, according to Johns Hopkins experts.
Among the other key findings of the three-year survey and study on the subject by the Johns Hopkins team are that a third of this group, or more than 22 million, were unaware of their vulnerability, having had no previous incidents of disequilibrium or sudden falls to suggest that anything was wrong.