News by Subject Medicine & Health

University of Miami Miller School of Medicine's Dr. Monica A. Perez, Associate Professor, Department of Neurological Surgery and The Miami Project, and colleagues, recently published 'A novel cortical target to enhance hand motor output in humans with spinal cord injury' in the June issue of Brain that provides the first evidence that cortical targets could represent a novel therapeutic site for improving motor function in humans paralyzed by spinal cord injury.

A new study finds that college students with disabilities binge drink more often than their non-disabled student peers. The study, providing the first picture of alcohol use and binge drinking by US college students with disabilities, is out today in Public Health Reports, a SAGE Publishing journal and the official journal of the Office of the US Surgeon General and the US Public Health Service.

Emotional control varies among children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), and researchers using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) for whole brain analysis identified relationships between emotional lability and neuronal activity in two brain regions.

A new study by the University of Toronto found that the lifetime prevalence of suicide attempts was much higher for women who had been diagnosed with learning disabilities (16.6 percent) compared to women who had not (3.3 percent). Men with learning disabilities also were more likely to have attempted suicide compared to men without learning disorders (7.7 percent vs 2.1 percent).

Adolescent drivers with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) have a 36 percent higher crash risk than other newly licensed teens. Although elevated, this risk is far lower than previous reports of being four times higher. This is the first large-scale study to provide detailed information on crash risk of adolescents with ADHD compared to other newly licensed young drivers.

Many eligible children do not enroll in services to improve cognitive, behavioral and physical skills under the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act and the rates of enrollment vary in part by which agency at the state level is serving as the lead administrator.

Researchers from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have developed a new system that uses a 3-D camera, a belt with separately controllable vibrational motors distributed around it, and an electronically reconfigurable Braille interface to give visually impaired users more information about their environments.

Stroke patients who learned to use their minds to open and close a plastic brace fitted over their paralyzed hands gained some ability to control their own hands when they were not wearing the brace, according to a new study from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. The participants, all of whom had moderate to severe paralysis, showed significant improvement in grasping objects.