Physical Activity Can Reduce The Genetic Predisposition To Obesity By 40 Percent
Archives
All entries, chronologically...
We must stop considering the different brain structure of autistic individuals to be a deficiency, as research reveals that many autistic people – not just “savants” – have qualities and abilities that may exceed those of people who do not have the condition, according to a provocative article published today in Nature by Dr. Laurent Mottron at the University of Montreal’s Centre for Excellence in Pervasive Development Disorders.
A yet unidentified component of coffee interacts with the beverage’s caffeine, which could be a surprising reason why daily coffee intake protects against Alzheimer’s disease. A new Alzheimer’s disease mouse study by researchers at the University of South Florida found that this interaction boosts blood levels of a critical growth factor that seems to fight off the Alzheimer’s disease process.
New research has shown that children’s risk for learning and behavior problems and obesity rises in correlation to their level of trauma exposure, says the psychiatrist at the Stanford University School of Medicine and Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital who oversaw the study. The findings could encourage physicians to consider diagnosing post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) rather than attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), which has similar symptoms to PTSD but very different treatment.
An advanced imaging technique has revealed that some U.S. military personnel with mild blast-related traumatic brain injuries have abnormalities in the brain that have not been seen with other types of imaging. The abnormalities were found in the brain’s white matter, the wiring system that nerve cells in the brain use to communicate with each other.
Overweight and obese people looking to drop some pounds and considering one of the popular low-carbohydrate diets, along with moderate exercise, need not worry that the higher proportion of fat in such a program compared to a low-fat, high-carb diet may harm their arteries, suggests a pair of new studies by heart and vascular researchers at Johns Hopkins.
Cell phones are a ubiquitous part of our lives. New independent studies offer stunning proof that confirms findings from the Council of Europe — pulsed digital signals from cell phones disrupt DNA, impair brain function, and lower sperm count. A meeting convened by Environmental Health Trust, with the Turkish cancer society, and Gazi University, revealed new research on this important issue showing damage to DNA, brain, and sperm. Dr. Devra Davis, a member of a Nobel Peace Prize team, chairs this meeting with Prof. Nesrin Seyhan, a WHO and NATO advisor who is head and founder of Biophysics Department and Bioelectromagnetics Laboratory at Gazi University in Ankara and founder of the Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection (GNRP) Center.
No one knows the cause of most cases of Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, and other neurodegenerative disorders. But researchers have found that certain factors are consistently associated with these debilitating conditions. One is DNA damage by reactive oxygen species, highly destructive molecules usually formed as a byproduct of cellular respiration. Another is the presence of excessive levels of copper and iron in regions of the brain associated with the particular disorder.
For the first time, researchers at McMaster University have conclusive evidence that bacteria residing in the gut influence brain chemistry and behavior. The findings are important because several common types of gastrointestinal disease, including irritable bowel syndrome, are frequently associated with anxiety or depression. In addition, there has been speculation that some psychiatric disorders, such as late onset autism, may be associated with an abnormal bacterial content in the gut. The research appears in the online edition of the journalGastroenterology.
You may remember the color of your loved one’s eyes for years. But how? Scientists believe that long-term potentiation (LTP) – the long-lasting increase of signals across a connection between brain cells – underlies our ability to remember over time and to learn, but how that happens is a central question in neuroscience.
The brain – awake and sleeping – is awash in electrical activity, and not just from the individual pings of single neurons communicating with each other. In fact, the brain is enveloped in countless overlapping electric fields, generated by the neural circuits of scores of communicating neurons. The fields were once thought to be an “epiphenomenon, a ‘bug’ of sorts, occurring during neural communication,” says neuroscientist Costas Anastassiou, a postdoctoral scholar in biology at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).
