MRI Brain Scans Accurate in Early Diagnosis of Alzheimer's Disease

piggy submitted, created time 2 weeks 1 day (www.sciencedaily.com)

JOURNAL: ScienceDaily
DESCRIPTION: MRI scans that detect shrinkage in specific regions of the mid-brain attacked by Alzheimer’s disease accurately diagnose the neurodegenerative disease, even before symptoms interfere with daily function, a study by the Florida Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center (ADRC) in Miami and Tampa found.

The study, reported earlier this month in the journal Neurology, adds to a growing body of evidence indicating MRI brain scans provide valuable diagnostic information about Alzheimer’s disease

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A Brain Circuit for Bungee Jumping?

sea-maid submitted, created time 1 month 1 week (sciencenow.sciencemag.org)

Scientists have known for some time that the white matter in our brains--the strands of nerve fibers that connect nerve cell bodies, or gray matter--serve as the wires through which neural information flows. However, figuring out exactly which parts of the brain connect to each other, and how strong these connections are, has only been possible recently in living humans thanks to a technique called diffusion tensor imaging. A type of magnetic resonance imaging, the method traces the web of white matter by following the diffusion of fluid through the nerve fibers

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Dyslexic diversity

Neural Correlates of Sexual Arousal in Homosexual and Heterosexual Men.

daphne submitted, created time 1 year 6 months (content2.apa.org)

Men exhibit much higher levels of genital and subjective arousal to sexual stimuli containing their preferred sex than they do to stimuli containing only the nonpreferred sex. This study used event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging to investigate how this category-specific pattern would be reflected in the brains of homosexual (n = 11) and heterosexual (n = 11) men.

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MRI Gives Better Insight Into Brain Anatomical Structures

psychologist submitted, created time 1 year 7 months (www.medicalnewstoday.com)

"Magnetic resonance imaging is a very effective method for revealing anatomical details of soft tissues. Contrast agents can help to make these images even clearer and allow physiological processes to be followed in real time. Conventional gadolinium complexes currently used as MRI contrast agent cannot reveal anatomic structures."

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Robotics: Engineers Announce Plastic, Air- And Light-driven Device More Precise Than Human Hand

dovechocolate submitted, created time 1 year 8 months (www.sciencedaily.com)

Engineers at the Johns Hopkins Urology Robotics Lab report the invention of a motor without metal or electricity that can safely power remote-controlled robotic medical devices used for cancer biopsies and therapies guided by magnetic resonance imaging. The motor that drives the devices can be so precisely controlled by computer that movements are steadier and more precise than a human hand

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Fronto-limbic brain structures in suicidal and non-suicidal female patients with major depressive disorder

julie submitted, created time 1 year 9 months (www.nature.com)

"Our knowledge about the neurobiology of suicide is limited. It has been proposed that suicidal behavior generally requires biological abnormalities concomitant with the personality trait of impulsivity/aggression, besides an acute psychiatric illness or psychosocial stressor."

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“ MRI detection of transcriptional regulation of gene expression in transgenic mice”

channel submitted, created time 1 year 9 months (www.nature.com)

“Ferritin, the iron storage protein, was recently suggested to be a candidate reporter for the detection of gene expression by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). The generation of TET:EGFP-HAferritin (tet-hfer) transgenic mice, in which tissue-specific inducible transcriptional regulation of expression of the heavy chain of ferritin could be detected in vivo by MRI. We show organ specificity by mating the tet-hfer mice with transgenic mice expressing tetracycline transactivator (tTA) in liver hepatocytes and in vascular endothelial cells

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Altered orbitofrontal sulcogyral pattern in schizophrenia

athena submitted, created time 1 year 9 months (brain.oxfordjournals.org)

Orbitofrontal alteration in schizophrenia has not been well characterized, likely due to marked anatomical variability.To investigate the presence of such alterations, they evaluated the sulcogyral pattern of this ‘H-shaped’ sulcus

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