Brain

Philadelphia, PA, January 13, 2016 - Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is a diagnostic label applied to people who have problems regulating emotional mood swings. This emotional instability leaves such individuals vulnerable to emotional upheaval that puts them at risk for problem behaviors, including self-destructive acts and impulsive aggression.

A new study in Biological Psychiatry provides a quantitative summary of the brain abnormalities that may be underlying the emotional upheaval patients with BPD experience daily.

The increase in use of prescribed opioids among women during pregnancy has probably contributed to the rise in neonatal abstinence syndrome, argues Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse at the National Institutes of Health, in The BMJ today.

A new study from The University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston fills an important gap in understanding the link between traumatic brain injury and neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer's disease.

Previously, UTMB researchers found a toxic form of tau protein that increases after a traumatic brain injury that may contribute to development of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a condition experienced by many professional athletes and military personnel. What remained a mystery was if this protein could cause dementia symptoms.

January 12, 2016 -- Young children in deep poverty, whose family income is below 50 percent of the federal poverty line, fare even worse on health and development indicators than children in poverty, according to a study released by the National Center for Children in Poverty (NCCP) at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health. The study compared the well-being of children in deep poverty to children who are poor, but not in deep poverty, and to non-poor children.

Our innate ability to track time is important for our everyday lives. We would not be able to speak, or even walk properly if we were not able to get the timing of each action just right. How are we able to track time? Are there a bunch of neural clocks ticking away somewhere deep inside our brain, cuing us on when to perform different actions?

Montreal, January 12, 2016 -- If your toddler is a Forgetful Jones, you might want to help boost his or her brainpower sooner rather than later. New research shows that preschoolers who score lower on a memory task are likely to score higher on a dropout risk scale at the age of 12.

"Identifying students who are at risk of eventually dropping out of high school is an important step in preventing this social problem," says Caroline Fitzpatrick, first author of a study recently published in Intelligence, and a researcher at Concordia's PERFORM Centre.

Different groups of neurons "predict" the body's subsequent looking and reaching movements, suggesting an orchestration among distinct parts of the brain, a team of neuroscientists has found. The study enhances our understanding of the decision-making process, potentially offering insights into different forms of mental illness--afflictions in which this dynamic is typically impaired.