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Witness brain scan doesn’t help

May 12, 2010 By vani Leave a Comment

London, May 12 (ANI): Monitoring brain activity of witnesses reveals no more than what they say they remember, a study has shown.

The study by Jesse Rissman and his team at Stanford University in California comes amid controversy over whether to admit functional MRI scans as evidence in US courts.

As part of their research, the team asked 16 volunteers to view 200 mugshots, reports New Scientist.

An hour later, they were again shown pictures of faces, some of which they had seen before and others that were new.

The researchers recorded fMRI scans of the volunteers” brains as they reported which faces they recognised.

While the brain scans matched the volunteers” decisions on whether the faces were familiar, they could not predict if the recollection was accurate.

The team also don”t know how easily a witness could cheat the system: remembering a recent event or fabricating a lie may look the same to the scanner.

The study has been published in the Journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. (ANI)

Filed Under: International News Tagged With: academy of sciences, Brain activity, brain scan, brain scans, brains, controversy, faces, journal proceedings, mri scans, mugshots, National Academy of Sciences, New Scientist, proceedings of the national academy, proceedings of the national academy of sciences, recollection, Rissman, scanner, stanford university, volunteers, witness

Injured Lee likely to be ruled out of T20 World Cup

April 28, 2010 By vani Leave a Comment

St. Lucia, Apr 28(ANI): Australian fast bowler Brett Lee is likely to be ruled out of the Twenty20 World Cup after sustaining a muscle strain in his right forearm during the warm up game against Zimbabwe.

Lee complained of a muscle strain in the same spot of the right elbow that required surgery in December last year and hastened his retirement from Test cricket in February.

He took 1 for 13 in four overs in the match at Beausejour Cricket Ground, and later underwent MRI scans to determine the seriousness of the strain.

Australian physio Alex Kontouris, however was adamant that the injury was unrelated to Lee’s elbow surgery, Fox Sports reports.

The Australian team management has already put in a request to the International Cricket Council to see if they can replace the injured fast bowler.

While no names have been mentioned, fellow fast bowlers Doug Bollinger and Ryan Harris are being considered as the logical choice. (ANI)

Filed Under: International News Tagged With: bollinger, brett lee, Elbow Surgery, forearm, fox sports, international cricket council, logical choice, mri scans, Muscle Strain, physio, retirement, right elbow, ryan harris, seriousness, St Lucia, t20 world cup, team management, test cricket, twenty20 world cup, Zimbabwe

Shock wave from bomb blasts can generate electric fields in skulls

April 24, 2010 By vani Leave a Comment

Washington, April 24 (ANI): Shock waves produced due to a bomb blast may electrify the brain and damage it, according to a new study.

“It”s always exciting to look at a phenomenon that may have been missed in the past,” Live Science quoted Steven Johnson, a theoretical physicist at MIT, as saying.

He added: “Moreover, this is potentially an issue that can directly affect the lives of our soldiers, which gives it a special interest for all of us who are involved.”

Several materials produce electricity when they are mechanically stressed. Known as piezoelectricity, this effect is commonly witnessed in guitar pickups and loudspeakers.

Johnson and his team designed a new computer model of the electric fields created in the skull by an improvised explosive device (IED).

The results suggest the generated electric fields could exceed electrical safety guidelines by a factor of 10.

While there are numerous uncertainties at present these electric pulses could help find a new class of medical diagnostic tools for blast-induced head injuries like customized helmets.

Johnson said: “We are looking into whether antennas inside the helmet could pick up the electric field generated when the blast impacts the skull, which would provide a direct measure of the head”s exposure to a blast wave.

“Eventually, the reading could be used for diagnosis,” he added. “If the reading is above a certain threshold determined by injury research, the soldier could be directed to further screening and treatment – MRI scans and so on.” (ANI)

Filed Under: International News Tagged With: April 24, Blast Wave, bomb blast, bomb blasts, computer model, Electric Pulses, Electrical Safety, explosive device, Guitar Pickups, head injuries, live science, loudspeakers, Medical Diagnostic Tools, mri scans, Piezoelectricity, Safety Guidelines, shock wave, shock waves, skulls, Theoretical Physicist

Network problem harms brain in Alzheimer’s disease!

March 29, 2010 By vani Leave a Comment

Mon, Mar 29 12:02 PM

In what could pave the way for new strategies for early diagnosis and effective treatment of Alzheimer’s, scientists have found that the disease makes parts of the brain shrink “as messages fail to get through”.

The findings, published in the ‘Neurology’ journal, suggest a build-up of deposits of the protein amyloid-beta in a region of the brain known as temporal inferior cortex which is connected to the hippocampus involved in memory.

Alzheimer’s disease is characterised by two factors –a build-up of amyloid-beta plaques in the brain, and a loss of neurons.

Lead scientist Dr Cassandra Szoeke of CSIRO said the puzzle for them was that the parts of the brain that had shrunk (atrophied) due to neuron loss were not the same as those showing increased deposits of amyloid-beta.

Using MRI scans to study Alzheimer’s disease affected brain tissue, the scientists found that shrinking (atrophy) of the hippocampus was associated with plaque deposits in the temporal inferior cortex.

The results indicate that the increased accumulation of amyloid in temporal inferior cortex disrupts connections with the hippocampus, causing the neurons to die, say the scientists.

“By helping to better understand the mechanisms involved in the progression of the disease, the study may guide the development of new strategies for early diagnosis,” Dr Szoeke said.
Agencies

Filed Under: International News Tagged With: accumulation, Alzheimer Disease, Alzheimer S Disease, atrophy, Brain Disease, brain tissue, cortex, csiro, diagnosis, Dr Cassandra, hippocampus, mechanisms, mri scans, Neurology Journal, Neuron, parts of the brain, Plaque Deposits, plaques, Protein Amyloid, scientist

Healthy older brains not smaller than younger ones

September 8, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, Sept 8 (ANI): The belief that healthy older brains are substantially smaller than younger brains has been deemed incorrect by Dutch researchers.

The authors suggest that previous findings may have overestimated atrophy and underestimated normal size for the older brain.

The new study tested participants in Holland’s long-term Maastricht Aging Study who were free of neurological problems such as dementia, Parkinson’s disease or stroke.

Once participants were deemed otherwise healthy, they took neuropsychological tests, including a screening test for dementia, at baseline and every three years afterward for nine years.

MRI scans were used to measure seven different parts of the brain, including the memory-laden hippocampus, the areas around it, and the frontal and cingulate areas of the cognitively critical cortex.

The participants were later divided into two groups: one group with 35 cognitively healthy people who stayed free of dementia (average starting age 69.1 years), and the other group with 30 people who showed substantial cognitive decline but were still dementia-free (average starting age 69.2 years).

In contrast to the 35 people who stayed healthy, the 30 people who declined cognitively over study-period showed a significant effect for age in the hippocampus and parahippocampal areas, and in the frontal and cingulate cortices.

In short, among the people whose cognition got worse, older participants had smaller brain areas than younger participants.

Thus, the seeming age-related atrophy in gray matter more likely reflected pathological changes in the brain that underlie significant cognitive decline than aging itself, wrote the authors.

As long as people stay cognitively healthy, the researchers believe that the gray matter of areas supporting cognition might not shrink much at all.

If future longitudinal studies find similar results, our conception of ‘normal’ brain aging may become more optimistic,” said lead author Saartje Burgmans, who is due to receive her PhD later this year.

The study appears in journal Neuropsychology. (ANI)

Filed Under: Science News Tagged With: atrophy, brain areas, cognition, cognitive decline, cortex, Cortices, dementia, Different Parts Of The Brain, dutch researchers, Gray Matter, longitudinal studies, Maastricht, mri scans, neurological problems, neuropsychological tests, parahippocampal areas, parts of the brain, pathological changes, screening test, study period, younger ones

Common variation in a gene may lead to structural changes in the brain

August 18, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, August 18 (ANI): Common variations in a gene behind Retts Syndrome, autism, and mental retardation have been found to be linked with differences in brain structure in both healthy individuals and patients with neurological and psychiatric disorders, says a report.

“We studied not only the gene itself – a gene called MECP2, which is known to have a big effect on brain development – but also the regions surrounding the gene, sometimes known as junk DNA,” said principle investigator Dr. Anders M. Dale, professor of Neurosciences and Radiology at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine.

“Looking at this ‘bigger window’ of genetic data, we discovered that common variations in the MECP2 region result in changes to brain structure, even in healthy individuals,” Dale added.

The international team of researchers behind the study say that the link between genetics and brain structure is a hotly debated area of research.

They highlight the fact that past studies investigating the link between gene variations and human brain structure have not used the types of refined brain measurements provided by the structural MRI scans and software developed at UC San Diego, or the and full genetic coverage included in the PNAS study.

Led by Ole A. Andreassen at Ullelval University Hospital and Institute of Psychiatry in Oslo, Norway, the research team provided data on one cohort – a sample from the Thematic Organized Psychosis (TOP) research group.

The data was compared to a sample from the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI), the largest Alzheimer’s disease study ever funded by the National Institutes of Health, in studies conducted at UC San Diego.

The researchers looked at 289 healthy and psychotic subjects from the TOP study, and 655 healthy and demented patients, largely with Alzheimer’s disease, from the ADNI study.

“The most statistically significant association between the two groups involved a minor allele of a single polymorphism, an inherited genetic variation that is found in more than one percent of the population. This variation resulted in structural brain changes, such as reduced surface area in the brain’s cortex, the area that plays a key role in memory, attention, perceptual awareness, thought and language,” said co-author Dr. Nicholas J. Schork, of the Scripps Translational Science Institute.

Although expressed in all cells, the researchers say that the MECP2 gene is developmentally regulated and exists in two different genetic transcripts within the brain’s neuronal cells.

According to them, changes in brain structure caused by this gene are specific to males, since the variation is found on the X chromosome, but the functional, cognitive consequences aren’t yet known.

Dale says that the fact that broader, common variations in the area surrounding the MECP2 gene also resulted in changes to the brain structure suggests that this gene may be a promising candidate gene for further study.

“Since each individual genetic mutation causes only small changes, the so-called ‘junk DNA’ may be where the action is,” he said.

He says that these regions may not change the gene or the protein it encodes, but change the regulation of the gene.

A research article describing the study has been published in the early online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. (ANI)

Filed Under: Health News Tagged With: allele, Alzheimer Disease, Alzheimer S Disease, autism, brain development, california san diego, genetic data, human brain structure, institute of psychiatry, Junk Dna, mecp2, Mental Retardation, mri scans, National Institutes of Health, Neurosciences, oslo norway, polymorphism, Principle Investigator, Psychiatric Disorders, school of medicine, uc san diego, university of california san diego

Novel MRI technique can lead to less breast biopsies in high-risk women

June 30, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, June 30 (ANI): Researchers from University of Wisconsin-Madison have suggested a new method, that when applied with MRI scans of the breast, can help rid women with increased breast cancer risk of the pain and stress of having to endure a biopsy of the lump or lesion.

It is recommended that women with certain breast cancer risk factors – including inherited genetic mutations, family or personal history of breast cancer, or previous radiation therapy to the chest should receive an annual MRI screening in addition to their yearly mammogram.

During a breast MRI, which lasts about a half hour, the technician injects a contrast agent into a vein in the patient’s arm.

The contrast agent flows throughout the body, including the breasts.

Because they are growing quickly, cancerous lesions often have immature vasculature, and the contrast agent flows in and “leaks” out quickly. Conversely, benign lesions show more gradual in and out flow.

“The tricky ones are the ones that enhance quickly and then fall off more slowly,” said Wally Block, a UW-Madison associate professor of biomedical engineering and medical physics.

“Many of these lesions turn out to be difficult to classify and lead to biopsy,” Block added.

The researchers suggest that right kind of MRI scan can help identify a cancerous lesion based on characteristics about its shape.

For instance, breaks or interruptions in a lesion can indicate a benign fibroadenoma. Lumps with smooth edges often are benign, while those with jagged edges can signal cancer.

With the new technique, an MRI machine acquires data radially and generates a high-resolution, three-dimensional image that radiologists can turn, slice and view from many perspectives – enabling them to study a lesion’s physical characteristics more carefully.

Machines equipped with the technique also acquire more data in less time. (ANI)

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Diabetes drug found to provide protective effects against multiple sclerosis

May 27, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, May 27 (ANI): University of Illinois researchers have observed that an FDA-approved drug, which is currently in use for diabetes treatment, shows some protective effects in the brains of patients with relapsing remitting multiple sclerosis.

This finding is based on a small, double-blinded clinical trial in which patients with relapsing remitting multiple sclerosis were assigned to take the drug pioglitazone or a placebo.

Patients continued their normal course of therapy during the trial.

The researchers initially carried out standard neurological and MRI scans to provide baseline values for lesions typically seen in MS patients.

The patients were evaluated every two months, and blood samples were taken. Repeat MRI scans were done after five months and again after one year.

Patients taking the drug showed significantly less loss of grey matter over the course of the one-year trial than patients taking placebo.

Of the 21 patients who finished the study, patients taking the medicine did not show any adverse reactions. They found taking pioglitazone, which is administered in an oral tablet, easy.

“This is very encouraging. Grey matter in the brain is the part that is rich in neurons. These preliminary results suggest that the drug has important effects on neuronal survival,” said Douglas Feinstein, research professor of anesthesiology at UIC.

The researchers revealed that they focused on pioglitazone because of its known anti-inflammatory effects.

They used primary cultures of brain cells to show that pioglitazone reduced the production of toxic chemicals called cytokines and reactive oxygen species, the molecules that are believed to be important in the development of symptoms in MS.

Feinstein’s lab has shown that pioglitazone and other TZDs “can significantly reduce the clinical signs in mice with an MS-type disease.”

“More importantly, when mice who are already ill are treated with pioglitazone, the clinical signs of the disease go away. We were able to induce almost complete remissions in a number of mice,” he said.

“We are now working to determine the mechanisms to explain the protective effect on neurons that we see in our studies. We hope to expand into a larger trial to confirm these preliminary results,” he added.

The study has been published in the online edition of the Journal of Neuroimmunology. (ANI)

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Brain’s size does matter when it comes to intelligence

March 26, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, March 26 (ANI): The brain’s size does matter when it comes to intelligence, if a new study led by researchers at the Montreal Neurological Institute (MNI), McGill University, is to be believed.

The researchers say that their study shows a positive link between cognitive ability and cortical thickness in the brains of healthy 6 to 18 year olds.

According to them, the correlation is evident in regions that integrate information from different parts of the brain.

The research team claim that theirs is the largest and most comprehensive of its kind with a representative sample of healthy children and adolescents.

The researchers gathered information about MRI scans and other data on the structure and function of the developing brains, which stemmed from the NIH MRI Study of Normal Brain Development.

They say that over 500 children and adolescents from newborns to 18-year-olds had brain scans multiple times over a period of years as well as intelligence, neuropsychological, verbal, non-verbal and behavioural tests.

The information contained within the database allowed the scientists to study how normal developmental changes in brain anatomy relate to motor and behavioural skills, such as motor coordination and language acquisition.

The team say that the database can be used even to assess higher-order skills like planning, IQ, and organizational skills.

The association between regional cortical thickness and intelligence has been little studied, and most previous studies of normal children had a relatively small sample.

The researchers said that their aim was to examine this relationship, and to further characterize and identify brain areas where cortical thickness was associated with cognitive performance.

They say that thicker cortices are likely to have more complex connections with consequences on cognitive ability.

During the study, a positive link between cortical thickness and cognitive ability was detected in many areas of the frontal, parietal, temporal, and occipital lobes.

The regions with the greatest relationship were the ‘multi-modal association’ areas, where information converges from various regions of the brain for processing, said the researchers.

“A principal finding of this study is that it supports a distributed model of intelligence where multiple areas of the brain are involved with cognitive ability difference instead of the view that there is just one centre or structure important for intelligence differences in the brain,” says Dr. Sherif Karama, psychiatrist at the MNI and co-investigator in the study.

“Previous studies have shown a link between intelligence differences and individual brain structure or function. This is the first time that a correlation between a general cognitive ability factor and essentially most, if not all, cortical association areas is demonstrated in the same study,” Karama adds.

A deeper insight into normal cognitive functioning and abilities is an important first step in the understanding of cognitive decline observed in the elderly as well as in those with various pathologies ranging from multiple sclerosis to schizophrenia, depression and mental retardation.

The team say that such an understanding may eventually lead to interventions that may be able to prevent or alleviate the decline or complications in cognitive function.

The study has been published in a special issue of scientific journal Intelligence. (ANI)

Filed Under: Science News Tagged With: 18 Year Olds, Behavioural Skills, brain anatomy, brain areas, cognitive ability, cognitive performance, Cortices, Developmental Changes, Different Parts Of The Brain, Language Acquisition, Mcgill University, Mni, Montreal Neurological Institute, Motor Coordination, mri scans, Mri Study, normal brain development, Organizational Skills, parts of the brain, representative sample

Listening to pleasant music ‘could help save stroke victims’ sight’

March 24, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, Mar 24 (ANI): Listening to enjoyable music could help save damaged sight in stroke victims, new research suggests.

According to the study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, up to 60 percent of stroke patients have impaired visual awareness of the outside world as a result, where they have trouble interacting with certain objects in the visual world.

This impaired visual awareness, known as ‘visual neglect’, is due to the damage that a stroke causes in brain areas that are critical for the integration of vision, attention and action. Visual neglect causes the patient to lose awareness of objects in the opposite side of space compared to the site of their brain injury.

As per researchers from Imperial College London, the University of Birmingham and other institutions, listening to favourite music may help stroke patients with impaired visual awareness to regain their ability to see.

To reach the conclusion, researchers looked at three patients who had lost awareness of half of their field of vision as a result of a stroke. The patients completed tasks under three conditions: while listening to their preferred music, while listening to music they did not like and in silence.

All three patients could identify coloured shapes and red lights in their depleted side of vision much more accurately while they were listening to their preferred music, compared with listening to music they did not like or silence.

The researchers believe that the improvement in visual awareness seen in patients could be as a result of patients experiencing positive emotions when listening to music that they like.

The team suggest that when a patient experiences positive emotions this may result in more efficient signalling in the brain. This may then improve the patient’s awareness by giving the brain more resources to process stimuli.

The team also used functional MRI scans to look at the way the brain functioned while the patients performed different tasks. They found that listening to pleasant music as the patients performed the visual tasks activated the brain in areas linked to positive emotional responses to stimuli. When the brain was activated in this way, the activation in emotion brain regions was coupled with the improvement of the patients’ awareness of the visual world.

Dr David Soto, the lead author of the study from the Division of Neurosciences and Mental Health at Imperial College London, said: Visual neglect can be a very distressing condition for stroke patients. It has a big effect on their day-to-day lives. For example, in extreme cases, patients with visual neglect may eat only the food on the right side of their plate, or shave only half of their face, thus failing to react to certain objects in the environment”.

“We wanted to see if music would improve visual awareness in these patients by influencing the individual’s emotional state. Our results are very promising, although we would like to look at a much larger group of patients with visual neglect and with other neuropsychological impairments.” (ANI)

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Shrinkage of hippocampus could predict Alzheimer’s development

March 17, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington. Mar 16 (ANI): A new study has revealed that people who have lost cells in the hippocampus area of the brain are more likely to develop dementia.

For the study, researchers involved 64 people with Alzheimer’s disease, 44 people with mild cognitive impairment, which is the stage of memory problems that precedes Alzheimer’s disease, and 34 people with no memory or thinking problems.

They performed MRI scans on all of the participants at the beginning of the study and again an average of a year and a half later.

During that time, 23 of the people with mild cognitive impairment had developed Alzheimer’s disease, along with three of the healthy participants.

The researchers measured the volume of the whole brain and the hippocampus area, which is affected by Alzheimer’s disease, at the beginning and end of the study, and calculated the rate of shrinkage in the brain over that time.

For people who did not have dementia at the beginning of the study, those with smaller hippocampal volumes and higher rates of shrinkage were two to four times as likely to develop dementia as those with larger volumes and a slower rate of atrophy.

“This finding seems to reflect that at the stage of mild cognitive impairment, considerable atrophy has already occurred in the hippocampus,” said study author Wouter Henneman, MD, of VU University Medical Center in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

“In people who already have Alzheimer’s disease, the loss of nerve cells is more widespread throughout the brain,” Henneman added.

The study has been published in the March 17, 2009, print issue of Neurology, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. (ANI)

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Epstein-Barr virus seems to play role in multiple sclerosis progression

March 4, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, March 3 (ANI): Scientists at the University at Buffalo and the University of Trieste, Italy, say that Epstein-Barr virus (EBV), which causes mononucleosis, may also be linked with the progression of multiple sclerosis, an incurable autoimmune disease that can cause major disability.

The researchers say that, in studies they have conducted, EBV appears to play a key role in the neurodegeneration that occurs in persons with multiple sclerosis.

“This study is one of the first to provide evidence that a viral agent may be related to the severity of MS disease process, as measured by MRI,” said Dr. Robert Zivadinov, associate professor of neurology in UB’s Jacobs Neurological Institute (JNI).

“A growing body of experimental evidence indicates that past infection with EBV may play a role in MS, but the relationship of EBV and the brain damage that can be seen on MRI scans had not been explored,” said Zivadinov.

He revealed that the study involved 135 patients who had been diagnosed with MS at the Multiple Sclerosis Center of the University of Trieste.

He further revealed that evaluations of the MRI scans were carried out at the University of Trieste, and at the JNI’s Buffalo Neuroimaging Analysis Center (BNAC).

The researcher said that the research team measured total brain volume, as well as the decrease in grey matter, at baseline and three years later.

According to him, the group’s observations suggested that higher levels of anti-EBV antibody measured at the beginning of the study were associated with an increased loss of grey matter and total brain volume over the three-year follow-up.

Zivadinov and his colleagues are presently conducted longitudinal studies in patients who experienced a condition called “clinically isolated syndrome”, a first neurologic episode that lasts at least 24 hours, and is caused by inflammation/demyelination in one or more sites in the central nervous system.

If a second episode occurs, the patient is diagnosed with MS, according to the researchers.

The team will study the relationship of anti-EBV antibody levels to development of grey matter atrophy, neurocognitive function and disability progression over time.

They are also studying interactions between environment, certain genes and EBV antibodies and the association with MRI injury in MS.

The current study has been published in the online edition of the Journal of Neurology. (ANI)

Filed Under: Health News Tagged With: autoimmune disease, brain damage, brain volume, central nervous system, demyelination, epstein barr virus, experimental evidence, grey matter, longitudinal studies, mri scans, ms disease, multiple sclerosis center, neurodegeneration, Neuroimaging, neurological institute, trieste italy, university at buffalo, university of trieste, viral agent, virus ebv