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Bachmann Migraine Story Underscores Lingering Stigma Nancy A. Melville July 22, 2011 — In a summer of unusually heated political turmoil and mudslinging from both sides of the aisle, the medical issue that has unexpectedly become caught in the crossfire seems somehow appropriate — migraines, and specifically, Rep. Michele Bachmann's migraines.The GOP presidential candidate's migraines became big news this week following a report on the Daily Caller Web site that an adviser to Representative Bachmann (R-Minnesota) said the congresswoman suffers from "intense" migraines, that when she gets them "she can't function at all," and she "takes all sorts of pills" for...

Sandra Witelson has spent much of her career studying the relationship between brain structure and function, and the differences in these between men and women. A neuroscientist from the Michael G. DeGroote School of Medicine at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Dr. Witelson has assembled a massive collection of brains for research and is known for studying Albert Einstein's brain and what made it unique. She sat down with The Wall Street Journal's Rebecca Blumenstein to discuss how brain differences can affect the skills, behavior, thinking and aspirations of men and women, and how that might relate to their careers....

Successfully treating and reversing the effects of multiple sclerosis, or MS, may one day be possible using a drug originally developed to treat chronic pain, according to Distinguished Professor Linda Watkins of the University of Colorado at Boulder. Watkins and her colleagues in CU-Boulder's department of psychology and neuroscience discovered that a single injection of a compound called ATL313 -- an anti-inflammatory drug being developed to treat chronic pain -- stopped the progression of MS-caused paralysis in rats for weeks at a time. Lisa Loram, a senior research associate who spearheaded the project in Watkins' laboratory, presented the findings at...

The two economists call their paper “Mental Retirement,” and their argument has intrigued behavioral researchers. Data from the United States, England and 11 other European countries suggest that the earlier people retire, the more quickly their memories decline. The implication, the economists and others say, is that there really seems to be something to the “use it or lose it” notion — if people want to preserve their memories and reasoning abilities, they may have to keep active. “It’s incredibly interesting and exciting,” said Laura L. Carstensen, director of the Center on Longevity at Stanford University. “It suggests that work...

US scientists have demonstrated the existence of undiscovered chemical pathways to an important class of bioactive lipids in the nervous system. Endocannabinoids are lipid messengers that play a key role in both central and peripheral tissues, where they participate in diverse physiological processes including appetite, pain-sensation, mood, and memory. Unlike other neurotransmitters such as amino acids and neuropeptides, they are not water soluble so cannot be stored in the body and are made on-demand from phospholipid precursors involving complex multiple pathways. A complete understanding of these mechanisms is crucial to understanding their effects in mammalian physiology, explains Benjamin Cravatt and Gabriel Simon at...

The human body may be equipped with a separate sensory system aside from the nerves that gives us the ability to touch and feel, according to a new study. Most of us have millions of different types of nerve endings just beneath the skin that let us feel our surroundings. However, the once-hidden and recently discovered skin sense, found in two patients, is located throughout the blood vessels and sweat glands, and most of us don’t even notice it’s there. “It’s almost like hearing the subtle sound of a single instrument in the midst of a symphony,” said senior author...

LAGUNA WOODS, Calif. — The ladies in the card room are playing bridge, and at their age the game is no hobby. It is a way of life, a daily comfort and challenge, the last communal campfire before all goes dark. “We play for blood,” says Ruth Cummins, 92, before taking a sip of Red Bull at a recent game. “It’s what keeps us going,” adds Georgia Scott, 99. “It’s where our closest friends are.” In recent years scientists have become intensely interested in what could be called a super memory club — the fewer than one in 200 of...

Almost four decades ago, the 26th Amendment lowered the US voting age to 18.  At the time, most neurologists believed that the human brain was fully developed by about age 12, so allowing Americans to vote at 18 seemed like a safe move. But parents of teenagers knew that was nonsense, and new research is confirming those parental observations.  Since the voting age was lowered in 1971, scientific advancements such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) allowed researchers to get detailed three-dimensional images of developing brains. Although human brains typically reach their adult size by age 12, they are far from...

No direct impact caused Paul McQuigg’s brain injury in Iraq three years ago. And no wound from the incident visibly explains why Mr. McQuigg, now an office manager at a California Marine base, can get lost in his own neighborhood or arrive at the grocery store having forgotten why he left home. But his blast injury — concussive brain trauma caused by an explosion’s invisible force waves — is no less real to him than a missing limb is to other veterans. Just how real could become clearer after he dies, when doctors slice up his brain to examine any...

A new test can accurately detect Alzheimer's disease in its earliest stages, before dementia symptoms surface and widespread damage occurs, U.S. researchers said on Monday. The test, which measures proteins in spinal fluid that can point to Alzheimer's, was 87 percent accurate at predicting which patients with early memory problems and other symptoms of cognitive impairment would eventually be diagnosed with Alzheimer's, they said. "With this test, we can reliably detect and track the progression of Alzheimer's disease," said Leslie Shaw of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, whose study appears in the Annals of Neurology. Such tests, which...

Mental powers start to dwindle at 27 after peaking at 22, marking the start of old age, US research suggests. Professor Timothy Salthouse of Virginia University found reasoning, speed of thought and spatial visualisation all decline in our late 20s. Therapies designed to stall or reverse the ageing process may need to start much earlier, he said. His seven-year study of 2,000 healthy people aged 18-60 is published in the journal Neurobiology of Aging. To test mental agility, the study participants had to solve puzzles, recall words and story details and spot patterns in letters and symbols. The same tests...

Journal removes paper from website after company threatens legal action. Lie detection — an emotional issue. The Swedish Research Council is wading into an escalating row over academic freedom after a peer-reviewed journal removed a published paper — penned by two Swedish academics — from its website following a threat of legal action from the company whose technology the research criticized.The controversial paper1, entitled 'Charlatanry in forensic speech science: a problem to be taken seriously', was first published in the International Journal of Speech, Language and the Law in December 2007. In it, speech scientists Francisco Lacerda of Stockholm University...

Researchers scanned the brains of certain men as they looked at a photograph of a woman in a bikini and discovered that sections of the brain that usually reacted to objects lit up. With men, who were known to have sexist tendencies, they also discovered that a part of the brain that usually turned on during social interaction actually de-activated when they saw the photograph. Professor Susan Fiske, of Princeton University, told the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting that she believes that the results show that some men did not see sexualised women as a "human"....

snip "There are some individuals who when confronted with extreme stress their hormone profile is rather unique," he said. "It doesn't reach the same peak as the rest of us. So we're all ready to scream in our chairs, but there are certain individuals who just don't get as stressed. "Their stress hormones are lower and the peptides that down-regulate that stress are higher, so you can see in action the hormonal regular system really hitting overdrive. "Certain people are cooler under pressure and they perform very, very well during these periods of time." Professor Aikins, who outlined his findings...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Diabetes can slow the brain, causing trouble with two types of mental processing in adults of all ages, Canadian researchers reported on Wednesday. Healthy adults did significantly better than diabetics on two tests of mental functioning -- executive functioning and speed of response, the team at the University of Alberta found. "Speed and executive functioning are thought to be among the major components of cognitive health," Roger Dixon, who worked on the study, said in a statement. Executive functioning includes the ability to focus, work with new information to solve problems and to give thoughtful answers to...

AP Science Writer Monkeys taught to play a computer game were able to overcome wrist paralysis with an experimental device that might lead to new treatments for patients with stroke and spinal cord injury. Remarkably, the monkeys regained use of paralyzed muscles by learning to control the activity of just a single brain cell. The result is "an important step forward," said Dawn Taylor of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, who studies the concept of using brain signals to overcome paralysis. She wasn't involved in the new work. The device monitored the activity of a brain cell and used...

Enlarge ImageAltered perceptions? Minimally conscious patients may have a greater capacity to feel pain than do those in a vegetative state (such as Terri Schiavo, above).Credit: Reuters Most of the time, doctors have a simple way to determine if a patient needs pain medication: They ask. But when a brain injury renders someone unable to respond to questions, the right course of action becomes murkier. Now a study finds that the brains of some patients with brain injuries respond to an unpleasant electrical shock much as do the brains of healthy people, suggesting that these patients may feel pain...

Musicians Use Both Sides Of Their Brains More Frequently Than Average People ScienceDaily (Oct. 3, 2008) — Supporting what many of us who are not musically talented have often felt, new research reveals that trained musicians really do think differently than the rest of us. Vanderbilt University psychologists have found that professionally trained musicians more effectively use a creative technique called divergent thinking, and also use both the left and the right sides of their frontal cortex more heavily than the average person. The research by Crystal Gibson, Bradley Folley and Sohee Park is currently in press at the journal...

Human brains appear to come in at least two flavours: male and female. Now variations in the density of the synapses that connect neurons may help to explain differences in how men and women think. Even when intelligence levels are equal, women and men excel at different cognitive tasks. But although brain size and neuron density differ between the sexes, these don't seem to correlate with cognitive differences. So, Javier DeFelipe at Complutense University in Madrid, Spain, and colleagues counted the number of synapses instead. The brain tissue they analysed came from the left temporal cortex, a region of the...

Scientists have for the first time recorded individual brain cells in the act of summoning a spontaneous memory, revealing not only where a remembered experience is registered but also, in part, how the brain is able to recreate it. The recordings, taken from the brains of epilepsy patients being prepared for surgery, demonstrate that these spontaneous memories reside in some of the same neurons that fired most furiously when the recalled event had been experienced. Researchers had long theorized as much but until now had only indirect evidence. Experts said the study had all but closed the case: For the...