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Alzheimer’s dementia predicted by brain amyloid levels, age. Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have developed an approach to estimating when a person who is likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease, but has no cognitive symptoms, will start showing signs of Alzheimer’s dementia. The algorithm, available online in the journal Neurology, uses data from a kind of brain scan known as amyloid positron emission tomography (PET) to gauge brain levels of the key Alzheimer’s protein amyloid beta. In those who eventually develop Alzheimer’s dementia, amyloid silently builds up in the brain for up to two decades before...

A study found that poor language skills and language delays can be predicted even before the child is diagnosed with autism. Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a developmental disability that affects one's social, communication and behavior. There is no medical test yet used to rule out if a child has autism, but symptoms are usually detected as early as 18 months or younger. However, some are not diagnosed until they are older, which delays the help that they need. Language delays are very common in ASD children, and doctors usually recommend speech therapy. Researchers at at the University of California,...

Guidelines warn doctors against using brain scans for routine headache and migraine cases. Despite this, 12% of patients presenting with headache to a doctor are given scans, according to a study by researchers at the University of Michigan Medical School. Since the guidelines discouraging the use of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and computed tomography (CT) scans for headache were published, scans have become more - rather than less - common for headache sufferers. Headaches can sometimes be a symptom of a more serious illness, such as a brain tumor, aneurysm or arteriovenous malformation. Doctors might order an MRI or CT...

The battle to protect patients in a so-called vegetative state from euthanasia took a positive turn today with the news that doctors have been able to communicate with one patient. A Canadian man who was believed to have been in a persistent vegetative state for more than a decade has been able to communicate with scientists that he is not in any pain. It’s the first time an uncommunicative brain-injured patient has been able to communicate. The news could change the way doctors and society views such patients. From the story: Scott Routley, 39, was asked questions while having his...

As any high school senior staring down the SAT knows, when the stakes are high, some test-takers choke. A new study finds that activity in distinct parts of the brain can predict whether a person will remain cool or crumble under pressure. The results, presented April 1 at the annual meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, offer some great new clues that may help scientists understand how the brain copes with stressful situations, says psychologist Thomas Carr of Michigan State University in East Lansing. “Sometimes you come across a study you wish you'd done yourself,” he says “This is such...

The amount of cholesterol circulating in the bloodstream is partly regulated by the brain, a study in mice suggests. It counters assumptions that levels are solely controlled by what we eat and by cholesterol production in the liver. The US study in Nature Neuroscience found that a hunger hormone in the brain acts as the "remote control" for cholesterol travelling round the body.Too much cholesterol causes hardened fatty arteries, raising the risk of a heart attack. The research carried out by a US team at the University of Cincinnati found that increased levels of the hunger hormone ghrelin in mice...

A woman suffering from health problems seeks divine intervention to help pay her medical bills. She says the Virgin Mary appears in a scan of her brain, and she's betting someone will want to buy the image.

MUMBAI, India: The new technology is, to its critics, Orwellian. Others view it as a silver bullet against terrorism that could render waterboarding and other harsh interrogation methods obsolete. Some scientists predict the end of lying as we know it. Now, well before any consensus on the technology's readiness, India has become the first country to convict someone of a crime relying on evidence from this controversial machine: a brain scanner that produces images of the human mind in action and is said to reveal signs that a suspect remembers details of the crime in question. For years, scientists have...

Excerpt - Last Sunday at a San Francisco hotel ballroom, EmSense researchers fitted five volunteers, all undecided Republicans, with battery-powered headsets made of elastic and lined with bits of copper. As they watched the debate on a big screen, the wireless units, which the company calls "EmGear," collected data on their skin temperature, heart rate, eye-blinking and brain activity and beamed them to a bank of computers. The data were run through a formula created by EmSense to identify whether a response was positive or negative. When John McCain ran through a list of Hispanic politicians who had endorsed him,...

AT LAST we know where the penis is represented in the male brain. The genitalia's location on the "homunculus", the brain's map of body parts, has been in dispute since the 1920s. Now Christian Kell at the University of Frankfurt in Germany has put eight men into an MRI scanner to help settle the question. Using a soft brush, Kell stroked parts of each volunteer's body while recording brain activity. Each man's penis was represented in the same place - flanked by the areas for the toes and abdomen - Kell told the Organisation of Human Brain Mapping annual meeting...

Scientists say they can read a person's unconscious thoughts using a simple brain scan. Functional MRI scans plot brain activity by looking at brain blood flow and are already used by researchers. A team at University College London found with fMRI they could tell what a person was thinking deep down even when the individual was unaware themselves. The findings, published in Nature Neuroscience, offer exiting new ways to probe the subconscious, said experts. This is the first basic step to reading somebody's mind Researcher Dr Geraint Rees In the experiment, Dr Geraint Rees and Dr John-Dylan Haynes measured brain...