News by Subject Medicine & Health

Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences at University of California San Diego researchers describe new use of leukemia drug, nilotinib, to treat subtype of medulloblastoma, a deadly pediatric brain cancer.

Researchers discovered that annexin A11, a gene linked to a rare form of ALS, may play a critical role in the transport of important, RNA encoded housekeeping instructions throughout neurons. Their results suggest that the gene does this by hitching RNA granules onto traveling lysosomes and that disease-causing mutations prevent hitchhiking.

To best serve the clinical needs of individuals with MS, neuropsychological testing needs to be viewed in larger context comprising non-cognitive variables, such as motor ability and demographic values, fatigue and depression, and disease activity and level of disability, as well as person-specific factors such as personality and coping styles. 'It's important to note that other types of assessments used to evaluate individuals with MS need to be subjected to the same standards for validity as neuropsychological assessments,' said Dr. Weber.

Predicting heart disease might also be a warning sign for Alzheimer's; A new way to think about the environment and Alzheimer's research; Most dementia patients don't receive care from physicians who specialize in brain health.

Walking may be a key clinical tool in helping medics accurately identify the specific type of dementia a patient has, pioneering research has revealed.

In a study of mice, a team of Japanese and US researchers show that REM sleep may be a time when the brain actively forgets. Their results suggest that forgetting during sleep may be controlled by neurons found deep inside the brain that were previously known for making an appetite stimulating hormone.

Unlike US residents, people in a remote area of the Bolivian rain forest usually do not perceive the similarities between two versions of the same note played at different registers, an octave apart. This discovery by researchers from MIT and Columbia University may help scientists tease out elements of perception that cannot be seen when examining only a single, homogenous group.