https://medicalxpress.com/ en-us Medical Xpress internet news portal provides the latest news on science including: Physics, Nanotechnology, Life Sciences, Space Science, Earth Science, Environment, Health and Medicine. Medical and research experts on Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders (FASD), including those at San Diego State, are continuing to warn women about the dangers of drinking during pregnancy. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2013-09-affirm-dangers-pregnancy.html Tue, 10 Sep 2013 09:09:12 EDT news298022942 Language is a uniquely human ability. The average person's vocabulary consists of about thirty thousand words, although there are individual differences in the ability to learn a new language. It has long been believed that language acquisition depends on the integration of the information between motor and auditory representation of words in the brain, but the neural mechanisms that lie behind learning new words remained unclear. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2013-07-language-good-regions-left-hemisphere.html Mon, 22 Jul 2013 15:00:07 EDT news293722809 Different brain areas are activated when we choose to suppress an emotion, compared to when we are instructed to inhibit an emotion, according a new study from the UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience and Ghent University. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2013-05-brain-emotional-self-control.html Thu, 09 May 2013 09:19:20 EDT news287309860 (Medical Xpress)—This week over 150 neuroscientists were invited to meet in Arlington, Virginia to discuss the finer points of President Obama's recently announced BRAIN Initative. Rather than discuss funding particulars, each participant was given the chance to broadly declare what they thought needed to be done in neuroscience. At least 75 of the participants initially responded to a request for a short white paper outlining the major obstacles currently impeding neuroscience research. A live webcast of some of the key talks was available, although many of the smaller workshops were held in private. Fortunately, updates regarding the content discussed at these workshops was posted live to twitter under the handle @openconnectome. This precipitated lively discussion, primarily under the hashtags #nsfBRAINmtg or #braini, and provided a way for a larger audience to be involved. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2013-05-neuroscientists-national-brainstorming-session.html Wed, 08 May 2013 15:13:18 EDT news287244748 Using MRI, neuroscientists at Georgetown University Medical Center found significant differences in brain anatomy when comparing men and women with dyslexia to their non-dyslexic control groups, suggesting that the disorder may have a different brain-based manifestation based on sex. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2013-05-brain-anatomy-dyslexia-men-women.html Wed, 08 May 2013 13:02:28 EDT news287236941 Many lines of evidence indicate that schizophrenia is a disorder of neurodevelopment. For example, genes implicated in the heritable risk for schizophrenia are also implicated in the development of nerve cells and their connections. Numerous findings in brain imaging studies describe the changes in brain structure and function associated with schizophrenia as emerging early in the course of the disorder. Some early brain imaging studies even found little or no evidence of progression of structural deficits. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2013-03-schizophrenia-disorder-neurodevelopment-aging.html Wed, 06 Mar 2013 07:43:39 EST news281778210 New research from the University of Helsinki, Finland, suggests that a mother's high blood pressure during pregnancy may have an effect on her child's thinking skills all the way into old age. The study is published in the October 3, 2012, online issue of Neurology. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-10-mom-high-blood-pressure-pregnancy.html Wed, 03 Oct 2012 16:00:03 EDT news268488898 Glucocorticoids, a group of hormones that includes cortisol, are considered stress hormones because their levels increase following stress. When their relationship to stress was first identified, it was shown that the release of cortisol prepared the body to cope with the physical demands of stress. Subsequently, high levels of cortisol were linked to depression and other stress-related disorders, giving rise to the hypothesis that high levels of cortisol on a long-term basis may impair the psychological capacity to cope with stress. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-09-stress-hormones-good-bad-posttraumatic.html Wed, 12 Sep 2012 12:01:57 EDT news266670103 Eating cocoa flavanols daily may improve mild cognitive impairment, according to new research in the American Heart Association's journal Hypertension. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-08-consuming-flavanol-rich-cocoa-brain-function.html Mon, 13 Aug 2012 16:00:05 EDT news264091961 Psychiatric disorders can be described on many levels, the most traditional of which are subjective descriptions of the experience of being depressed and the use of rating scales that quantify depressive symptoms. Over the past two decades, research has developed other strategies for describing the biological underpinnings of depression, including volumetric brain measurements using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and the patterns of gene expression in white blood cells. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-01-gene-depression-localized.html Wed, 04 Jan 2012 09:45:23 EST news244892707 Women who survive breast cancer show significant neurological impairment, and outcomes appear to be significantly poorer for those treated with chemotherapy, according to a report in the November issue of the Archives of Neurology. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2011-11-neurological-function-impairment-breast-cancer.html Mon, 14 Nov 2011 16:25:53 EST news240510346 New research shows that exposure to stressors in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) is associated with alterations in the brain structure and function of very preterm infants. According to the study now available in Annals of Neurology, a journal published by Wiley-Blackwell on behalf of the American Neurological Association and Child Neurology Society, infants who experienced early exposure to stress displayed decreased brain size, functional connectivity, and abnormal motor behavior. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2011-10-preterm-infants-exposed-stressors-nicu.html Tue, 04 Oct 2011 04:38:32 EDT news236921898