As any student who's had to study for multiple exams can tell you, trying to learn two different sets of facts one after another is challenging. As you study for the physics exam, almost inevitably some of the information for the history exam is forgotten. It has been widely believed that this interference between memories develops because the brain simply does not have the capacity necessary to process bot ...

In the late 1990s, Jane Anderson was working as a landscape architect. That meant she did not work much in the winter, and she struggled with seasonal affective disorder in the dreary Minnesota winter months. She decided to try meditation and noticed a change within a month. Her experience inspired a new study which will be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Associatio ...

A drug widely used in over-the-counter cough medicines appears to protect against symptoms of multiple sclerosis, a finding that could offer a new and inexpensive therapy for a condition with few effective treatment options, a study by UC Davis researchers has found. The study is available online in the journal Neurobiology of Disease. ...

Treating chronic migraines with behavioral approaches – such as biofeedback, relaxation training, and hypnosis – can make financial sense compared to prescription-drug treatment, especially after a year or more, a new study found. Longtime behavioral therapy researcher and practitioner Dr. Donald Penzien, University of Mississippi Medical Center professor of psychiatry, coauthored the study. ...

Prenatal exposure to selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, especially during the first trimester, is associated with a modest increase the risk of developing an autism spectrum disorder, according to a report published Online First in the Archives of General Psychiatry, one of the JAMA/Archives journals. The research was conducted by Lisa A. Croen, Ph.D., of Kaiser Permanente Northern California, Oakland ...

Smoking cigarettes is a dangerous habit that many are struggling to break, but for the smokers who choose to use one of the most popular smoking cessation drugs on the market, new warnings about the risk of serious cardiovascular events are on their way. This is because a new study by researchers at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center, in collaboration with researchers at Johns Hopkins University School of M ...

New research has suggested that tranexamic acid has the potential to prevent people dying from head injuries. The CRASH-2 Intracranial Bleeding Study highlights the potential of the cheap, off-patent drug to help people suffering from brain trauma, also known as traumatic brain injury (TBI). The results are now published online in the BMJ. ...

Yale School of Medicine researchers have found that a clinical trial of the epilepsy drug gabapentin may have been a "seeding trial" used by a pharmaceutical company to promote the drug and increase prescriptions, according to a report in the June issue of Archives of Internal Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals. As described in the study by Yale assistant professor of medicine Joseph Ross, M.D., an ...

Egocentric, self-centred, and insensitive to the needs of others: these social problems often arise in people with severe traumatic brain injury (TBI) and have been attributed in part to a loss of emotional empathy, the capacity to recognise and understand the emotions of other people. Given that traumatic brain injuries are becoming more common, and resulting empathy deficits can have negative repercussion ...

A side effect of many commonly used drugs appears to increase the risks of both cognitive impairment and death in older people, according to new research led by the University of East Anglia (UEA). As part of the Medical Research Council's Cognitive Function and Ageing Studies (CFAS) project, the study is the first systematic investigation into the long term health impacts of 'anticholinergic activity' – a ...