News by Subject Medicine & Health

In a new study from the Department of Anesthesiology and Center for Consciousness Science at Michigan Medicine, researchers identify a key area in the cortex that appears to be the gate of conscious awareness.

Pioneering neural recordings in patients with Parkinson's disease by UC San Francisco scientists lays the groundwork for personalized brain stimulation to treat Parkinson's and other neurological disorders.

researchers from the Center for BrainHealth® at The University of Texas at Dallas are investigating a potential new early indicator of the decline toward Alzheimer's disease: measuring the energy metabolism of the living human brain using cutting-edge imaging techniques.

"We confirmed the longitudinal stability of social cognition deficits in cognitively-normal people with relapsing-remitting MS, mirroring the amygdala structural damage and psychological well-being," said Dr. Genova. "These results confirm that social cognition exerts a key role in MS, affecting individuals' everyday lives. Our research highlights the need to identify treatments to improve social cognition in this population."

Research compares effectiveness of seeking social support in real-life versus over social media.

The potential uses of human pluripotent stem cells in medicine are hampered by the stress of growing in a cell culture dish, which can damage their DNA and lead to cell death. NCATS researchers have devised a small-molecule cocktail that can protect stem cells from stress. They suggest that the cocktail could enhance the potential uses of stem cells, ranging from treating diseases and conditions like Parkinson's disease and spinal cord injury to genome editing.

An investigation led by the INc-UAB, carried out from the study of a drug that modifies memory of fear, shows for the first time that the neural processes and behaviours related to the formation of memory can be opposite between male and female mice. The drug reduces the ability to remember aversive events in male mice and increases this ability in female mice. The study emphasizes the need for more research that includes females.

Scientists at the Krembil Brain Institute, part of University Health Network (UHN), in collaboration with colleagues at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH), have used precious and rare access to live human cortical tissue to identify functionally important features that make human neurons unique. This experimental work is among the first of its kind on live human neurons and one of the largest studies of the diversity of human cortical pyramidal cells to date.