Brain

Taking the street drug Ecstasy could lead to a potentially fatal weakening and rupture of the spinal cord artery, doctors have warned in the Journal of NeuroInterventional Surgery.

Posterior spinal artery aneurysms - a blood-filled swelling of the spinal cord artery, caused by a weakening and distension of the vessel wall - are rare, with only 12 cases reported to date. But all of them caused spinal bleeding which affected the function of the spinal cord.

Doctors discovered one of these aneurysms in a previously healthy teenager who had taken Ecstasy or MDMA.

LEXINGTON, Ky. (July 3, 2014) -- Researchers from the Sanders-Brown Center on Aging at the University of Kentucky have been able to confirm anecdotal information on patients with both Alzheimer's disease (AD) and cerebrovascular disease (CVD) using mouse models in two different studies.

The findings of these two studies, which were recently published in Acta Neuropathologica and Alzheimer's Research & Therapy, have potentially significant implications for patients with both disorders.

Understanding the basis of psychiatric disorders has been extremely challenging because there are many genetic variants that may increase risk but are insufficient to cause disease. Now investigators reporting in the July 3rd issue of the Cell Press journal Cell Stem Cell describe a strategy that may help reveal how such "subthreshold" genetic risks interact with other risk factors or environmental exposures to affect the development of the nervous system. Their research pinpoints a genetic variant that may predispose individuals to schizophrenia.

La Jolla, Calif., July 3, 2014 - A new study by researchers at Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute (Sanford-Burnham) has identified a chemical "switch" that controls both the generation of new neurons from neural stem cells and the survival of existing nerve cells in the brain. The switch that shuts off the signals that promote neuron production and survival is in abundance in the brains of Alzheimer's patients and stroke victims.

ANN ARBOR, Mich. — Deep inside the brains of people with dementia and Lou Gehrig's disease, globs of abnormal protein gum up the inner workings of brain cells – dooming them to an early death.

But boosting those cells' natural ability to clean up those clogs might hold the key to better treatment for such conditions.

That's the key finding of new research from a University of Michigan Medical School physician scientist and his colleagues in California and the United Kingdom. They reported their latest findings this week in the journal Nature Chemical Biology.

Various manual tasks in everyday life require the use of the right hand or are optimized for right-handers. Around 90 percent of the general population is right-handed, only about 10 percent is left-handed. The study of Ulrich Tran, Stefan Stieger, and Martin Voracek comprised two large and independent samples of nearly 13000 adults from Austria and Germany. As in modern genetic studies, where a discovery-and-replication-sample design is standard, the use of two samples allowed testing the replicability and robustness of findings within one-and-the-same study.

Adults who have dyslexia are much more likely to report they were physically abused before they turned 18 than their peers without dyslexia, according to a new study from researchers at the University of Toronto and the University of North Carolina School of Medicine in Chapel Hill.

Thirty-five per cent of adults with dyslexia report they were physically abused before they turned 18. In contrast, seven per cent of those without dyslexia reported that they had experienced childhood physical abuse.