On the quest for safe, reliable and accessible tools to accurately diagnose Alzheimer's disease, researchers from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania found a new way of diagnosing and tracking Alzheimer's disease, using an innovative magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) technique called Arterial spin labeling (ASL) to measure changes in brain function. The team determined that the ...

The brain scans of high school football and hockey players showed subtle injury - even if they did not suffer a concussion – after taking routine hits to the head during the normal course of play, according to a University of Rochester Medical Center study. The research is preliminary, involving a small sample of athletes, but nonetheless raises powerful questions about the consequences of the mildest head ...

Depression is one of the most common mental disorders in the elderly, but little is known about the underlying biology of its development in older adults. In a small study published in the November issue of the peer-reviewed journal Archives of General Psychiatry, UCLA researchers used a unique brain scan to assess the levels of amyloid plaques and tau tangles in older adults with a type of severe depressio ...

Computer analysis of brain scans could help predict how severe the future illness course of a patient with psychosis will be, according to research funded by the Medical Research Council and the Wellcome Trust. The findings could allow doctors to make more accurate decisions about how best to treat patients. Psychosis is a condition that affects people's minds, altering the way they think, feel and behave. ...

In a small, preliminary study that included 13 male children, those with autism had an average 67 percent more prefrontal brain neurons and larger than average brain weight, than children without autism, according to a study in the November 9 issue of JAMA. The study was carried out by Eric Courchesne, Ph.D., of the NIH-UCSD School of Medicine Autism Center of Excellence, La Jolla, Calif., and colleagues. ...

After excessively violent events, shoot 'em up games regularly come under scrutiny. In Norway, several first-person shooter games actually disappeared from the market for a while after the killings. Does intense fighting on a flat screen display also result in aggressive behavior in real life? Researchers from the University of Bonn found brain activity patterns in heavy gamers that differed from those of n ...

A new report in Biological Psychiatry suggests that deficits in endocannabinoid function may contribute to anorexia nervosa and bulimia. Endocannabinoids are substances made by the brain that affect brain function and chemistry in ways that resemble the effects of cannabis derivatives, including marijuana and hashish. These commonly abused drugs are well known to increase appetite, i.e. to cause the “munchi ...

roblems like anxiety and depression are caused by psychological and environmental factors, and are known to be influenced by genetic proclivities. However, it is still not clear how each factor affects the brain's functions to induce anxious and depressive symptoms. To shed light on these interactions, a team from the Centre Émotion-Remédiation et Réalité Virtuelle (Center for Emotion Remediation and Virtua ...

Researchers at UCLA have found a possible explanation for why autistic children act and think differently than their peers. For the first time, they have shown that the connections between brain regions that are important for language and social skills grow much more slowly in boys with autism than in non-autistic children. Included in this report is a video time lapse comparison of normal brain versus auti ...

New research suggests the growth rate of the brain’s cerebral cortex in babies born prematurely may predict how well they are able to think, speak, plan and pay attention later in childhood. The research is published in the October 12, 2011, online issue ofNeurology, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. The cerebral cortex is the outer layer of the brain covering the cerebrum, and is re ...