At a cost of $38 billion a year, an estimated 5.3 million people are living with a permanent disability related to traumatic brain injury in the United States today, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The physical, mental and financial toll of a TBI can be enormous, but new research from the […]
A new study is providing what researchers are calling “unique and important insights” into potential mechanisms contributing to the Takotsubo syndrome (TTS) also known as “broken heart syndrome.” Results from the retrospective case-control study suggest that chronically heightened stress-associated neurobiological activity may affect both the risk for, and timing of, subsequent TTS. “The findings suggest […]
A large study of brain MRI scans from 11,679 nine- and ten-year-old children reviewed by UC San Francisco neuroradiologists identified potentially life-threatening conditions in 1 in 500 children, and more minor but possibly clinically significant brain abnormalities in 1 out of 25 children. The results provide the best estimates to date of the true incidence […]
Job descriptions for the thousands of types of neurons in the brain typically include a common function: release chemicals called neurotransmitters to communicate across circuit connections called synapses. In a new study funded by the National Institutes of Health, the lab of MIT Professor Troy Littleton will seek to understand how neurons construct synapses of […]
If you count yourself among those who lose themselves in the lives of fictional characters, scientists now have a better idea of how that happens. Researchers found that the more immersed people tend to get into “becoming” a fictional character, the more they use the same part of the brain to think about the character […]
Mapping the cerebral vascular network in human patients, at unprecedented scales: This tour de force has been achieved by the French laboratory Physics for Medicine Paris (ESPCI Paris-PSL, Inserm, CNRS). In a study published on the front page of Nature Biomedical Engineering, the research team details its method—ultrasound localization microscopy, which combines ultrafast sonography and […]
Akinobu "Aki" Watanabe, Ph.D., assistant professor of anatomy at New York Institute of Technology College of Osteopathic Medicine (NYITCOM), has secured a prestigious Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) award from the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF). Watanabe, a vertebrate paleontologist, is the first New York Institute of Technology faculty member to receive a CAREER […]
The human brain is less accessible than other organs because it is covered by a thick, hard skull. As a result, researchers have been limited to low-resolution imaging or analysis of brain signals measured outside the skull. This has proved to be a major hindrance in brain research, including research on developmental stages, causes of […]
The brain’s emotion-processing center—the amygdala—is one of several brain regions involved in social behavior. But the exact role that this almond-shaped structure plays in the so-called ‘social brain’ remains mysterious. Now, researchers at the Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research (FMI) in Basel, Switzerland, have found that the activity of different populations of neurons in […]
The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has claimed well over 2.4 million lives, but its long-term sequelae are still being identified. The severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) produces an infection that may be associated with a wide spectrum of disease, from asymptomatic to critical or terminal respiratory failure or multi-organ dysfunction. A new […]
