News by Subject Medicine & Health

Scientists in Japan's brain science project have used machine intelligence to improve the accuracy and reliability of a powerful brain-mapping technique, a new study reports. Their development, published on December 18th in Scientific Reports, gives researchers more confidence in using the technique to untangle the human brain's wiring and to better understand the changes in this wiring that accompany neurological or mental disorders such as Parkinson's or Alzheimer's disease.

Spinal cord injury (SCI) often causes disability and seriously compromises quality of life. The major reasons for the difficulty of treatment for SCI might be due to the fact that many neurons are lost during the injury, leading to permanent loss of neural functions. An innovative gene therapy approach regenerated functional new neurons using local glial cells in the injured spinal cord, bringing new hope to millions of SCI patients worldwide.

Researchers have identified the driving force behind a cellular process linked to neurodegenerative disorders such as Parkinson's and motor neurone disease.

A novel method that looks at the molecular composition of brain synapses has revealed three times more proteins than previously thought, finds research published in PNAS.

Scientists have produced a tomato enriched in the Parkinson's disease drug L-DOPA in what could become a new, affordable source of one of the world's essential medicines.

According to an article in ARRS' American Journal of Roentgenology (AJR), a prototype 16-channel head Adaptive Image Receive (AIR) radiofrequency coil from GE Healthcare outperformed a conventional 8-channel head coil for in vivo whole-brain imaging, though it did not perform as well as a conventional 32-channel head coil.