Blood test predicts chance of dementia
... Frontal lobe dementia Frontal lobe dementia (Frontotemporal Dementia, FTD) strikes ... In FTD, the disease process starts in the frontal lobe where large numbers of brain cells begin to die ...NYU scientists set stage for understanding how color vision is processed
... future scholarship to explore how color vision is processed in the optic lobe of the fruit fly Drosophila, providing a paradigm for more complex systems ... using our results will help reveal the exact function of the optic lobe cells in these complex circuits and to reach a better understanding of the ...Yerkes researchers identify language feature unique to human brain
... to be involved in human language, such as Broca's area in the frontal lobe and Wernicke's area in the temporal lobe. Using DTI, researchers compared ... We know from previous functional imaging studies that the middle temporal lobe is involved with analyzing the meanings of words. In humans, it seems the ...Odd protein interaction guides development of olfactory system
... environment into discrete signals in the brain. The fruit fly antennal lobe is analogous to the olfactory bulb in humans. Researchers at the University of Illinois found that in the flys antennal lobe a common nervous system receptor actually inhibits the activity of the ...Scientists track impact of DNA damage in the developing brain
... process known as gliosis. Overall changes in the hippocampus mimicked those found in the brains of adults with the seizure disorder known as temporal lobe epilepsy. In this study, the loss of Xrcc1 also resulted in seizures in mice. ...Computer simulations explain the limitations of working memory
... only capable of retaining between two and seven different pictures simultaneously. As working memory load rises, the active neurons in the parietal lobe increasingly inhibit the activity of surrounding cells. The inhibition of the inter-neuronal impulses eventually becomes so strong that it prevents ...Drops in blood oxygen levels may be key to sudden death in some epilepsy patients
... of these patients' blood oxygen levels actually dropped below 70 percent during their seizures. They also discovered that seizures in the temporal lobe of the brain are more often associated with significant drops in blood-oxygen levels and that males are more likely than females to experience ...UNC, Caltech research finds further evidence for genetic contribution to autism
... that idea through brain imaging studies. One area of interest is the amygdala, a region located on either side of the brain in the medial temporal lobe that is known to process information about facial emotions and may have abnormal volume in both autistic individuals and their nonautistic siblings. ...A baby's smile is a natural high
... neurotransmitter dopamine. Specifically, the areas associated included the ventral tegmental area/substantia nigra regions, the striatum, and frontal lobe regions involved in emotion processing, cognition and motor/behavioral outputs. "These are areas that have been activated in other experiments ...Cognitive, genetic clues identified in imaging study of alcohol addiction
... individual choice in regions associated with decision making -- the posterior parietal cortex, the dorsal prefrontal cortex, the anterior temporal lobe and the orbital frontal cortex. People who sustain damage to the orbital frontal cortex generally suffer impaired judgment; they manage money ...Endobronchial valve significantly improves emphysema
... patients who had a fissure completely separating the lobes of the lung and whose endobronchial valves were placed to exclude the entire diseased lobe had changes in FEV-1 of greater than 20 percent, he said. This is akin to the results achieved in unilateral lung-volume reduction surgery, without ...Genetic contributions to human brain morphology and intelligence
... and functional relevance Twin studies have also shown that genetic effects vary regionally within the brain, with high heritabilities of frontal lobe volumes (9095%), moderate estimates in the hippocampus (4069%), and environmental factors influencing several medial brain areas. However, the ...Studies yield insight into the numerical brain
... colleagues showed that regions of the parietal lobe activate in response to numbers, either when they ... that the two hemispheres of the parietal lobe function differently in processing numbers. While the left lobe harbors abstract numerical representations, the ...Stroke study sheds light on left-right brain divide
... damage might face in everyday life.’ 23 people, each with frontal lobe damage, performed a ‘rule-switching’ task which involved learning rules ... errors. This suggests that people who suffer damage to their right frontal lobe following a stroke may struggle in everyday situations which require ...Researchers find cause of frontotemporal dementia
... affects the frontal lobe, causing the brain tissue to die off. The frontal lobe is the foremost part of the brain and accounts for about 30% of the brain's mass. Among other things, the frontal lobe is involved in regulating behavior, movement and mood, and is responsible ...Gene tests and brain imaging reveal early dementia
... an increased risk of Alzheimer's. In her study, Johanna Lind was able to show that some of the people in this risk group had reduced parietal lobe activity, detectable using an MR camera, and that these same people were the ones who went on to suffer memory deterioration two to three years ....Gene therapy inhibits epilepsy in animals
... because the dentate gyrus acts as a gateway for brain activity into the hippocampus, an area that is critical to generating seizures in temporal lobe epilepsy, the most common type of epilepsy in children and adults. GABA(A) receptors are made up of five subunits--proteins that play important ...Brain regions do not communicate efficiently in adults with autism
... for two minutes. The researchers found patterns of higher than normal neural connectivity in the left hemisphere, particularly in the temporal lobe of the persons with autism within two different frequencies of brain waves, the delta and theta bands. This part of the brain is associated with ...Study offers window into human behavior, brain disease
... deteriorate in Parkinson's disease, motor neurons of the spinal cord and motor cortex degenerate in ALS and specific memory-forming medial temporal lobe neurons die in early Alzheimer's disease. "We hope to add von Economo neurons to that list," says Seeley. "It's a pretty important list to fill ...The brain's motivation station
... those scenes later forgotten--activated the reward areas of the mesolimbic region as well as the learning-related hippocampus in the medial temporal lobe (MTL) of the brain. Activation prior to scene visualization suggests that the brain actually prepares in advance to filter incoming information ...Mice learn tasks that may help treat human psychiatric disorders
... trichotillomania (hair pulling), obsessive-compulsive disorder, Parkinson's disease, schizophrenia, Tourette's syndrome, traumatic frontal brain lobe injury and a host of other human mental disorders for which set shifting is an important monitoring tool." According to the Centers for Disease ...Memory loss affects more of the brain than previously thought
... of activation in the posterior frontal lobes (during retrieval). "These findings suggest that we should be paying closer attention to frontal lobe function in detecting people at risk for AD and may also point to new preventive strategies," said co-principal investigator P. Murali Doraiswamy, ...Study ties 'new' cell-death mechanism to developmental and degenerative brain disorders
... by degeneration of nerve cells in the cerebellum, while the cell death of Alzheimer's disease takes place in the hippocampus of the temporal lobe and that of Parkinson's disease occurs in the substantia nigra of the brain stem. Pulst said the new findings on neurodegeneration do not ...How Fruitflies Know It's Time for Lunch
... Drosophila have traced the path of olfactory signals beginning with chemical receptors in the mouth, which set off neurons that signal the antennal lobe of the central nervous system. From here, the electrical stimulation zooms toward the so-called mushroom body, a mushroom-shaped cluster of neurons ...Team led by Carnegie Mellon University scientist finds first evidence of a living memory trace
... a working memory trace. In the current research, the scientists studied clusters of neurons called glomeruli within the honeybee's antennal lobe (AL), considered the invertebrate equivalent of the brain's olfactory bulb. Team member Marcel Weidert placed fluorescent probes within different ...Scavenger cells could be key to treating HIV-related dementia
... travel to the temporal lobe, a part of the brain Alzheimer's disease often damages. Because the virus mutates nearly 100 times faster in the temporal lobe than other parts of the brain, attacking macrophages migrate there in a constant stream, causing harmful inflammation. Nearly 15 percent of HIV ...Investigating 'brain shrinkage' in alcoholics
... decisions and excessive drinking. With prolonged bouts of drinking, dependence may ensue along with neural systems damage, commonly affecting frontal lobe based systems and their functions, which include decision making, inhibition, problem solving, and judgment. This is part of the dynamic course of ...New tool reveals secrets of migrating cells
... primarily by Witt, suggest that this exploration probably is a search for a signal that will decide the cell's fate. In their experiments on one lobe of the mouse thymus, in fact, Witt and her colleagues saw cells, possibly those that have made a decision on their fate, halt their wanderings and ...