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Playing video games for hours on end may prepare your child to become a laparoscopic surgeon one day, a new study has shown. Reorganisation of the brain’s cortical network in young men with significant experience playing video games gives them an advantage not only in playing the games but also in performing other tasks requiring visuomotor skills. The findings are published in the October 2010 issue of Elsevier’s Cortex.
Simply getting older is not the cause of mild memory lapses often called senior moments, according to a new study by researchers at the Rush Alzheimer’s Disease Center. The study, published in the September 15, 2010, online issue of Neurology, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology, found that even the very early mild changes in memory that are much more common in old age than dementia are caused by the same brain lesions associated with Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias.
In Alzheimer’s disease, the problem is amyloid-β, a protein that accumulates in the brain and causes nerve cells to weaken and die. Drugs designed to eliminate plaques made of amyloid-β have a fatal problem: they need to enter the brain and remove the plaques without attacking healthy brain cells. A new breakthrough from the laboratory of Nobel Prize winner Paul Greengard, however, suggests that treatments modeled on the blockbuster cancer drug Gleevec could be the solution. The findings are reported in the September 2 issue of the journal Nature.
Psychological stress in middle age could lead to the development of dementia later in life, especially Alzheimer’s disease, reveals research from the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Based on data from a study which followed women for 35 years, this is the first research in Sweden to indicate a link between stress and dementia. The results were published in prestigious scientific journal Brain.
The ability to remember is not just to glimpse into the past; a sharp memory can help with creativity, productivity and even the ability to imagine the future, according to several psychologists. Sleep, aging and brain chemistry research were all discussed during several presentations on memory at the 118th Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association.
Many neuroscientists believe the loss of the brain region known as the amygdala would result in the brain’s inability to form new memories with emotional content. New UCLA research indicates this is not so and suggests that when one brain region is damaged, other regions can compensate. The research appears this week in the early online edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
Consuming more vitamin E through the diet appears to be associated with a lower risk of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease, according to a report in the July issue of Archives of Neurology, one of the JAMA/Archives journals. Oxidative stress – damage to the cells from oxygen exposure – is thought to play a role in the development of Alzheimer’s disease, according to background information in the article. Experimental data suggest that antioxidants, nutrients that help repair this damage, may protect against the degeneration of nervous system cells.
Scientists have discovered a compound that restores the capacity to form new memories in aging rats, likely by improving the survival of newborn neurons in the brain’s memory hub. The research, funded in part by the National Institutes of Health, has turned up clues to a neuroprotective mechanism that could lead to a treatment for Alzheimer’s disease.
A new study shows that having depression may nearly double your risk of developing dementia later in life. The research will be published in the July 6, 2010, issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. Researchers examined data on 949 people with an average age of 79 from the Framingham Heart Study.
Researchers have discovered that education not only delays the early symptoms of dementia, but can also slow down the development of the disease – a finding that could result in faster diagnosis and treatment of dementia, reveals a thesis from the Sahlgrenska Academy at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Previous studies have shown that education [...]
