by University of Granada Researchers from the Mind, Brain and Behaviour Research Centre (CIMCYC) of the University of Granada (UGR) have designed a test to detect dysphagia, a disorder that prevents people from swallowing when eating. It affects 8 percent of the world’s population. Dysphagia is prevalent among older people in particular (30 percent to...
Category: <span>Neuroscience</span>
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High-salt diet may trigger dementia
By Dr. Liji Thomas, MD We’ve all heard that taking too much salt can damage your blood vessels, and now a new study published in the journal Nature on October 23, 2019, says it’s true – a diet rich in salt reduces the levels of nitric oxide, which in turn alters the tau protein within...
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Brain immune cells may protect against OCD, anxiety
By Catharine Paddock, Ph.D. Fact checked by Isabel Godfrey Over the last decade, scientists have been discovering that microglia, a type of immune cell that resides in the brain, do more than respond to illness and infection. Now, new research in mice has linked the dysfunction of microglia of a particular genetic lineage to anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD)....
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A new discovery: How our memories stabilize while we sleep
CNRS Scientists at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research in Biology (CNRS/Collège de France/INSERM)[1] have shown that delta waves emitted while we sleep are not generalized periods of silence during which the cortex rests, as has been described for decades in the scientific literature. Instead, they isolate assemblies of neurons that play an essential role in long-term memory formation. These...
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No link found between youth contact sports and cognitive, mental health problems
UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO AT BOULDER Adolescents who play contact sports, including football, are no more likely to experience cognitive impairment, depression or suicidal thoughts in early adulthood than their peers, suggests a new University of Colorado Boulder study of nearly 11,000 youth followed for 14 years. The study, published this month in the Orthopaedic Journal...
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The night gardeners: Immune cells rewire, repair brain while we sleep
UNIVERSITY OF ROCHESTER MEDICAL CENTER Science tells us that a lot of good things happen in our brains while we sleep – learning and memories are consolidated and waste is removed, among other things. New research shows for the first time that important immune cells called microglia – which play an important role in reorganizing...
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Protein movement in cells hints at greater mysteries
by Mary L. Martialay, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute A new imaging technique that makes it possible to match motor proteins with the cargo they carry within a cell is upending a standard view of how cellular traffic reaches the correct destination. The research, which focuses on neurons and sheds light on some neurodegenerative diseases, was published...
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New insights into how the brain perceives and processes odors
by Society for Neuroscience New research makes advances in understanding how smells are perceived and represented in the brain. The findings were presented at Neuroscience 2019, the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience and the world’s largest source of emerging news about brain science and health. Olfactory cues provide essential information for finding food, navigation, predator avoidance, and social...
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In Alzheimer’s research, scientists reveal brain rhythm role
by Massachusetts Institute of Technology In the years since her lab discovered that exposing Alzheimer’s disease model mice to light flickering at the frequency of a key brain rhythm could stem the disorder’s pathology, MIT neuroscientist Li-Huei Tsai and her team at The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory have been working to understand what...
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Q-suite motor assessment tool promising for evaluating Huntington’s disease
by IOS Press In clinical trials of adults with Huntington’s disease (HD) the Q-Suite Motor Assessment Tool (Q-Motor) has proven to be helpful to detect and quantitate subtle motor abnormalities. With the anticipated arrival of preventive gene therapies that will most likely be administered to young children known to be carriers of the HD mutation,...