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.
The New York University Child Study Center is recommending five tips to help reduce teenage drinking, in light of a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
A new University of Georgia study suggests that rapid detection combined with aggressive education can dramatically curtail outbreaks of emerging infectious disease such as severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS).
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.
The sleep problems of older people are often not addressed by their doctors, even though treatment of those sleep disorders could improve their physical and mental health and enhance their quality of life. A new study from Northwestern University found when patients 60 years and older visited their doctors, physicians did not note sleep problems in the patients’ charts. This was significant because many of those patients suffered from insomnia and were not being treated.
McMaster University pediatric cancer specialist Dr. Ronald Barr says the teen gap in cancer care has been overlooked for far too long. Statistics show that gains in survival rates for teenagers and young adults (age 15-29) with cancer are dismal when compared to those for youngsters and older adults with the disease.Barr is one of the editors of the recently released and first definitive document on the incidence, survival and mortality of 15-29 year-olds.
Cornell researchers studied a virus related to the avian influenza virus to see whether a hypothetical mutated form of H5N1 could infect people through drinking and wastewater systems.
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.
This year, tens of thousands of heart patients will have high-tech devices implanted in their chests. Called ICDs or implantable cardioverter defibrillators, the expensive devices are designed to shock damaged hearts back into rhythm and save patients from sudden cardiac death. But a new study finds that while many of these patients will benefit from their ICDs, a large number won’t — and a simple heart-rhythm test can tell who’s who.