Featured series 
Tag: Neurology
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Stages of memory described in study
“To initiate a memory is almost like creating a word processing file on a computer,” explains researcher Matthew Walker, instructor of psychiatry at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School. “Once the file has been created, if you don’t hit the ‘save’ button before shutting off the computer it will be lost. Our…
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Early molecule fingered as an Alzheimer’s cause
“The way we look at it, Alzheimer’s disease is really cancer of the brain,” says Rachael Neve, Harvard Medical School associate professor of psychiatry at McLean Hospital. “But neurons cannot divide and form tumors so they undergo apoptosis (cell death) instead.” Neve; Donna McPhie, Harvard Medical School instructor in psychiatry; and their colleagues show in…
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Risk of stroke from obesity is now measurable
While it has been suspected for some time that being overweight could potentially increase a person’s chances of a stroke, a study published in the Dec. 9, 2002, issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine offers some of the first concrete evidence that as a man’s weight increases, so do his chances of suffering from…
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Stem cells reduce brain damage
Mice with the kind of brain damage caused by strokes or cerebral palsy received implants of stem cells that resulted in the spontaneous replacement of many of the missing cells, according to Evan Snyder, a neurologist at the Harvard Medical School, who led the research. In other experiments, stem cells unexpectedly rescued the injured nerve…
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Starship memories
Psychologists are at odds over the idea that people can forget traumatic events then “recover” intact memories of the trauma years later. On one side are clinicians, who observe that painful memories can be repressed, banished from a trauma survivor’s consciousness until they’re “recovered” with the help of certain psychotherapeutic techniques in adulthood. Memory researchers,…
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Protector protein part of nerve cell defense
Heat shock proteins are known to protect all cell types from various general assaults. They were originally discovered when cultured cells that were heated expressed the proteins at high levels and proved more resistant to other injuries and toxins. They help fold proteins that are misfolded in times of crisis, help maintain structural integrity of…
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Genes found that regulate brain size
A gene that builds bigger brains, called beta-catenin, was discovered in the laboratory of Christopher A. Walsh, Bullard Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School. Researchers there engineered increased activity into the beta-catenin gene in mice, and the mice brains grew to almost twice the usual size. Not only that, but the cerebral cortex, seat…
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Chili peppers and inflammation
Researchers have discovered that the burinng pain of arthritis is similar to the pain associated with eating chili peppers. “The receptor activated by chili peppers in the mouth and other tissues also increases in the terminals of sensory neurons in the skin after inflammation, and this contributes to pain hypersensitivity,” says Clifford Woolf, director of…
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Alzheimer’s-associated enzyme elevated in key brain areas
A research report that appears in the September 2002 issue of the journal Archives of Neurology may improve understanding of the most common form of Alzheimer’s disease. “Our key finding is that beta-secretase activity — the efficiency of how the enzyme works — is increased in Alzheimer’s diseased brains specifically in those areas affected by…
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Brake on Axon regrowth discovered
Since nerve cell axons in the mature central nervous system do not regrow, neurologists have no way of fully treating paralysis due to injury. “About a hundred years ago, people started asking why it was impossible to get the axon to regenerate upon injury,” said Zhigang He, Harvard Medical School assistant professor of neurology at…
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Practice makes perfect
Harvard Medical School researchers conducted a study in which people were taught to type a sequence of keys on a computer keyboard as quickly and accurately as possible. A group trained in the morning and then re-tested 12 hours later were able to improve their performance by about two percent. However, the performance of those…
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Investigators discover method to stimulate brain rewiring after stroke
After a stroke, brain cells die and their connections to other parts of the brain are lost. In a study with rats conducted at Children’s Hospital in Boston, a naturally occurring substance called inosine was shown to stimulate nerve cells in undamaged parts of the brain to grow new connections into brain areas that had…
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Old-line antibiotic seen to save neurons
Developed as an antibiotic 30 years ago, a drug called minocycline was later discovered to ease acne, rheumatoid arthritis, and other inflammatory conditions. A few years ago, it was shown to slow and even limit the neuronal damage caused by stroke and Huntington’s disease in mice. But researchers were not sure how it works in…
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Science illuminates art
Monet and other painters exploited the parallel visual processing of color and brightness. A sunset seems to shimmer, a field of poppies seems to wave, and a river seems to flow when there is a disconnect between the color and luminance pathways, according to a book, Vision and Art: The Biology of Seeing, by Margaret…
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Changes in brain shown with learning
Harvard Medical School researchers Vadim Bolshakov, Evgeny Tsvetkov, and Bill Carlezon, based at McLean Hospital, reported with colleagues in the April 11, 2002 issue of the journal Neuron that they have found clear evidence of cause and effect between learning and long-term changes in the brain. Their research focused on how learned fear made changes…
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Imagination important for children’s cognitive development
Paul Harris, a professor at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, says there are two very different ways to define imagination. “You can either see it as disappearing or waning during childhood, or you can see it the way I do, as persisting throughout life,” Harris says. The message in his book, “The Work of the…
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Researchers find better way to predict childhood brain tumor outcomes
About 2,000 children a year are diagnosed with medulloblastoma, or brain tumor. In a study, researchers examined gene expression patterns from 99 patient tumor samples of three different types of brain tumors. In addition to distinguishing tumor types from each other, the study found strong expression of a signaling protein known as “Sonic Hedgehog,” which…
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Lack of protein ApoE in brain may raise Alzheimer’s risk
Brain cells are protected from possible contamination by substances in circulating blood by what is known as “the blood-brain barrier.” Researchers have many questions about precisely how this protective mechanism works. Recently, Harvard Medical Sschool researchers identified a protein that supports the blood-brain barrier. When a molecule, apolipoprotein E (apoE), is absent, the barrier becomes…
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Study adds to the understanding of musical pitch perception
There are differences in the sounds of two voices or two musical instruments even if they hit the same note, and somehow the brain knows that. A new study shows that the auditory cortex, an area of the brain that interprets sound, is important for frequency processing and pitch perception. The research findings, published in…
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Pain and pleasure activate same brain structures
David Borsook is a Harvard Medical School associate professor of radiology, who both treats patients and conducts research. “Over 15 years of seeing patients with pain it became obvious that we do not have good methods of assessing chronic pain,” Borsook says. “And we do not have good methods for treating it.” So Borsook and…
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Lithium drugs found to reduce suicide risk
Researchers who wondered about the effectiveness of lithium drugs in treating patients with severe depression analyzed 22 studies involving 5,647 patients. The scientists, working at Harvard-affiliated McLean Hospital in Belmont, found through their analysis that those who took the drug showed a nine-fold lower rate of suicide compared to those who did not. “The evidence…
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“Commoner” in brain crowns the cortex
With its role in higher cognitive functions, the cortex represents a significant evolutionary development in mammals, culminating in the enlarged hemispheres of humans and other primates. In the development of this crowning structure, neurons are guided by factors that are both genetic and environmental. A research team led by Christopher A. Walsh, the Bullard professor…
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Dopamine may play dual role in Parkinson’s disease
According to the Parkinson’s Disease Foundation, “Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a disorder of the central nervous system that affects between one and one-and-a-half million Americans. Because it is not contagious and does not have to be reported by physicians, the incidence of the disease is often underestimated. PD may appear at any age, but it…
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Cognition unaffected by marijuana use
Harrison Pope, a Harvard professor of psychiatry, and his colleagues at McLean Hospital, a Harvard-affiliated psychiatric facility in Belmont, Mass., investigated the long-term cognitive effects of smoking marijuana. They recruited 180 people, who ranged from light to heavy users. Heavy use was defined as smoking pot at least 5,000 times. All the research subjects took…
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Caffeine linked to protection from Parkinson’s disease
Parkinson’s disease is a progressive nervous disease occurring generally after age 50. It destroys brain cells that produce dopamine and is characterized by muscular tremor, slowing of movement, weakness and facial paralysis. Men who drank four to five cups per day of caffeinated coffee cut the risk of developing Parkinson’s disease nearly in half compared…
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Women’s menstrual cycle holds clue to cocaine response
During the first half of their menstrual cycles, when their estrogen levels are high, women are protected from the brain-damaging effects of cocaine use, according to a research study conducted at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Mass., by a Harvard researcher and colleagues. Researcher Marc Kaufman believes that the finding could lead to a new drug…
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Circadian rhythms may distinguish Alzheimer’s disease
Researcher David Harper and his colleagues monitored two key components of the circadian system — the rise and fall of core body temperature and the waxing and waning of spontaneous motor activity — in 38 dementia patients with either Alzheimer’s disease or another form of dementia, frontotemporal degeneration. They found that body temperature reached its…
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Pain promoter plays unexpected role in central nervous system
Despite all the attention it draws in patients, pain has only in recent years been deemed a subject worthy of scientific scrutiny.
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Rules for music wired into the brain
“Music is in our genes,” says Mark Jude Tramo, a musician, prolific songwriter, and neuroscientist at Harvard Medical School. “Many researchers like myself are trying to understand melody, harmony, rhythm, and the feelings they produce, at the level of individual brain cells. At this level, there may be a universal set of rules that governs…
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Brain hesitates in assembling mosaic of motion
Your brain must integrate information from many different neurons in the primary visual cortex to interpret movement. But how does this complicated process work? Richard Born and Christopher Pack of Harvard Medical School report that an area of the brain known as the middle temporal (MT) visual area has a dynamic solution to the problem…