News by Subject Medicine & Health

In a new study, a team of researchers at McGill University has shown that, when given in a formulation that facilitates passage to the brain, lithium in doses up to 400 times lower than what is currently being prescribed for mood disorders is capable of both halting signs of advanced Alzheimer's pathology and of recovering lost cognitive abilities.

Approximately one-quarter of patients who are prescribed opioids for chronic pain misuse them, with five to 10 percent developing an opioid use disorder or addiction. In a new study, UC San Diego researchers found that opioid dependence produced permanent changes in the brains of rats.

An MRI study investigating the influence of changes in the neuroanatomy of trigeminal neuralgia found that both trigeminal nerve and brain structures such as the hippocampus can predict the surgical treatment outcome. Greater trigeminal nerve and hippocampus volumes were more associated with non-responders patients.

Researcher of the Netherlands Institute for neuroscience found that myelin, the sheath around neurons, creates a coaxial cable producing multiple waves of electrical potentials traveling in a more complicated manner than was envisioned earlier. These findings allow us to create better theories and tools to understand demyelinating diseases, including the most common neurological disorder, multiple sclerosis. The paper has been published in the prestigious scientific journal Cell.

The entire set of our emotions is mapped in a small region of the brain, a 3 centimeters area of the cortex, according to a study conducted at the IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca, Italy. The discovery of this 'map' of emotions comes from a work conducted by the Molecular Mind Laboratory (MoMiLab) directed by Professor Pietro Pietrini, and recently published in Nature Communications.

A new study published in Seizure gives insight into the short-term outcome of patients treated for status epilepticus in Kuopio University Hospital in Finland. The researchers found a 9% risk of death and a 32% risk of functional loss at one month after status epilepticus. The patient's risk of death could be predicted relatively reliably already in the emergency room by using status epilepticus-related prognostic tools.

A new study suggests that significant early childhood exposure to traffic-related air pollution (TRAP) is associated with structural changes in the brain at the age of 12.

A new study in Frontiers in Neuroscience used virtual reality to determine how people plan their movements by 'seeing' gravity using visual cues in the landscape around them, rather than 'feeling it' through changes in weight and balance.

Living near major roads or highways is linked to higher incidence of dementia, Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's disease and multiple sclerosis (MS), suggests new research published this week in the journal Environmental Health.