retardation

Genetic therapy reverses nervous system damage in animal model of inherited human disease

...erited disease in humans that causes severe mental retardation and skeletal abnormalities. Cats with AMD do not l...r a significant portion of the instances of mental retardation in children. Other examples include Tay-Sachs disease, Hunter disease and Pompe disease. In a lysoso...

OHSU research shows vitamin C counteracts some negative impacts of smoking on unborn babies

...ing pregnancy can cause premature delivery, growth retardation and has been blamed for 5 percent to 10 percent of all fetal and neonatal deaths. Maternal smoking can also cause decreased pulmonary function and increased respiratory illness in offspring. Previous research by the Spindel lab demonstrated that nico...

Scientists uncover new clues about brain function in human behavior

...e is usually associated with some degree of mental retardation or learning impairment) and compared to healthy controls. Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg, M.D., Ph.D., and Karen Berman, M.D., from the NIMH Genes, Cognition, and Psychosis Program, and colleagues, then showed participants pictures of angry or fearful face...

Anti-cancer drugs may hold promise for premature aging disorder

...l. But, as they grow older, they experience growth retardation and show dramatically accelerated symptoms of aging -- namely hair loss, skin wrinkling and fat loss. Accelerated cardiovascular disease also ensues, typically causing death from heart attack or stroke at about the age of 12. "Our findings show that...

Discovering the first steps in transcription-coupled repair

...t by skin cancer but by severe physical and mental retardation -- victims have an unusually small brain and fail to grow and develop normally after birth; pronounced wasting usually begins in the first year of life. As they grow older, CS sufferers look increasingly aged, with faces marked by sunken eyes. Averag...

Recreating 'Flowers for Algernon' with a happy ending

...g disabilities. "Learning disabilities and mental retardation each affect five percent of the world population," said Dr. Alcino Silva, professor of neurobiology, psychiatry and psychology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. "Currently, there are no treatment options for these people. That's why o...

Study ties 'new' cell-death mechanism to developmental and degenerative brain disorders

...e that neurodevelopmental disorders such as mental retardation and neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer'...ly's ataxia is a childhood-onset type, with mental retardation and seizures in some individuals. With mental retardation as one of the consequences, the KCNC3 pota...

Neurons find their place in the developing nervous system with the help of a sticky molecule

...fested in conditions such as hydrocephalus, mental retardation and spastic paraplegia. Whether mutations in MDGA1 lead to brain disorders remains to be seen. "Much work needs to be done, and the appropriate tools need to be developed to do this work," said O'Leary, "but we feel that these studies will eventual...

Tiny RNA molecules fine-tune the brain's synapses

...iR-134 may be relevant to disorders such as mental retardation and autism. He notes that loss of Limk1 due to a chromosomal deletion is associated with Williams syndrome, and that the BDNF pathway that activates Limk1 includes proteins that are disabled in tuberous sclerosis and Fragile X syndrome. All three ge...

In a technical tour de force, Salk scientists take a global view of the epigenome

...se of stem cells. And disease states, ranging from retardation to cancer, are marked by aberrant methylation: some carcinogens cause cancer by methylating the "wrong" genes, leading to uncontrolled growth. Once a cell's DNA methylation pattern - be it normal or pathological - is established, methylated sites ...

NHGRI announces latest sequencing targets

...tal duplicated regions, including a form of mental retardation and other neurological and birth defects. Segmental duplications cover 5.3 percent of the human genome, significantly more than in the rat genome, which has about 3 percent, or the mouse genome, which has between 1 and 2 percent. Segmen...

What controls stickiness of 'smart' chromosomal glue

...standing of the origins of miscarriages and mental retardation due to mis-segregation of chromosomes. "We first need to understand the key regulatory players and the molecular mechanisms that cause chromosomes to segregate in this very unusual way during meiosis," she said. "Once we have a good enough understa...

Drug treatment improves learning in mice with Down syndrome symptoms, Stanford/Packard study shows

...f chromosome 21. It is the leading cause of mental retardation in the country, and it is also associated with childhood heart disease, leukemia and early onset Alzheimer’s disease. The researchers used a mouse model of Down syndrome for their study in which about 150 genes are triplicated. The mice exhibit many ...

Experimental vaccine given during pregnancy reduces stillbirths from common virus

...us (CMV)—a common virus that can also cause mental retardation and hearing loss in newborn children who were infected in early fetal life. Estimates place the number of U.S. children born with CMV each year at about 40,000, and there is no vaccine or treatment for pregnant women who have the infection. In a 20...

Severe mental retardation gene mutation identified

... a novel gene mutation that causes X-linked mental retardation for which there was no previously known molecular ...escribe the ZDHHC9 gene found in those with severe retardation as being mutated to the point of entirely losing function. "ZDHHC9 is a novel gene," explains Dr....

How genetic malfunction causes a form of retardation

...e genetic malfunction that causes a form of mental retardation called Noonan Syndrome (NS) produces an imbalance in the genesis of two types of cells in the developing embryonic brain. This imbalance, they theorize, could explain how the genetic abnormality gives rise to the neural pathology of the disorder. Mor...

Researchers discover gene crucial for nerve cell insulation

... Dr. Svaren is an affiliate of NICHD-funded mental retardation and developmental disabilities research center at the Waisman Center at the University of Wisconsin. Until this discovery, researchers did not fully understand the complex genetic process that enables Schwann cells, found in the peripheral nervous...

Angelman syndrome deficits rescued in mice

...ore broadly, Weeber said, to other types of mental retardation syndromes that remained unexplained and untreatable. "There are a lot of mental retardation syndromes that we still don't understand. Maybe the changes in CaMKII associated with Angelman syndr...

Gene found for rare disorder may reveal new pathway in mental retardation

... human development, potentially in cases of mental retardation and autism. An international team of researchers...ork suggests that a subset of patients with mental retardation may have mutations in these genes, without showing the broader range of symptoms identified in disea...