It is estimated that 250,000 Americans over the age of 65 may have been misdiagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, and perhaps Parkinson’s disease, when in fact they have a treatable condition known as normal pressure hydrocephalus, or NPH.
Ashley X, called “Pillow Angel” by her parents, a bedridden 9-year-old girl had her uterus and breast tissue removed at a Seattle hospital and received large doses of hormones to halt her growth. She is now 4-foot-5; her parents say she would otherwise probably reach a normal 5-foot-6.
Early sensory stimulation may not be required for vision development.
A team of University of California, San Diego physicists and neuroscientists has discovered a bottleneck in the network of blood vessels in the brain that makes it vulnerable to strokes. The finding may explain the origin of the puzzling damage to the brain?s gray matter often detected in brain scans, especially among the elderly.
Research led by a team from UAB (University of Alabama at Birmingham) has shown that a dopamine agonist called rotigotine could be effective in treating symptoms of Parkinson?s disease (PD). In a study published Jan. 3 in the online edition of Neurology, rotigotine significantly improved symptoms in patients with early-stage PD.
Neuroscientists at Duke University have mapped the timing and sequence of neural activations that unfold in the brain when people focus their attention on specific locations in their visual fields.
Estrogen regulates the brain’s energy metabolism in the same way as the hormone leptin, leading the way to a viable approach to tackling obesity in people resistant to leptin, researchers at Yale School of Medicine report in the Dec_31 online issue of Nature Medicine.
A University of Vermont study suggests that the astrocytic BK channel is an important participant in the cellular process responsible for signaling regional blood flow changes in the brain, providing a new key to understanding such disorders as stroke, migraine and Alzheimer’s disease.
For the first time, researchers have used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to determine what parts of the brain are active when people consider whether to purchase a product and to predict whether or not they ultimately choose to buy the product. The study appears in the journal Neuron and was co-authored by scientists at Carnegie Mellon University, Stanford University and the MIT Sloan School of Management.
A gene known to be a major risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease puts out the welcome mat for the virus that causes cold sores, allowing the virus to be more active in the brain compared to other forms of the gene. The new findings, published online in the journal Neurobiology of Aging, add some scientific heft to the idea, long suspected by some scientists, that herpes somehow plays a role in bringing about Alzheimer’s disease.