Why do some teenagers start smoking or experimenting with drugswhile others don’t?
psychology
Maintain your brain: The secrets to aging success
Aging may seem unavoidable, but that’s not necessarily so when it comes to the brain. So say researchers in the April 27th issue of the Cell Press journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences explaining that it is what you do in old age that matters more when it comes to maintaining a youthful brain not what you did earlier in life.
Action videogames change brains: study
A team led by psychology professor Ian Spence at the University of Toronto reveals that playing an action videogame, even for a relatively short time, causes differences in brain activity and improvements in visual attention.
Gauging seizures’ severity
In this week’s issue of the journal Neurology, researchers at MIT and two Boston hospitals provide early evidence that a simple, unobtrusive wrist sensor could gauge the severity of epileptic seizures as accurately as electroencephalograms (EEGs) do but without the ungainly scalp electrodes and electrical leads. The device could make it possible to collect clinically useful data from epilepsy patients as they go about their daily lives, rather than requiring them to come to the hospital for observation. And if early results are borne out, it could even alert patients when their seizures are severe enough that they need to seek immediate medical attention.
Striatal brain volume predicts Huntington disease onset
Huntington disease (HD) is an inherited neurodegenerative disorder caused by a defect on chromosome four where, within the Huntingtin gene, a CAG repeat occurs too many times. Most individuals begin experiencing symptoms in their 40s or 50s, but studies have shown that significant brain atrophy occurs several years prior to an official HD diagnosis. As a result, the field has sought a preventive treatment that could be administered prior to the development of actual symptoms that might delay the onset of illness.