Brain & Aging
107 stories · Page 3 of 5
In Abstinent Mice, a Deep Brain Region More Than Doubles Its Activity Before Relapse
In mice, a deep brain region more than doubled its activity after they quit drinking, before they touched a drop again. Relapse-like drinking may be a brain adaptation, not a failure of will.
Brain & AgingThe Vitamin D Trials That Found No Brain Benefit Never Tested This Dose
Fifty-four older adults with failing sleep and early memory loss, and the ones taking 5,000 IU of vitamin D a day scored 13 percent higher on a standard cognitive test. The major null trials never tested that dose.
Brain & AgingA Brain Clock Says Your Fourth Language Is Worth 13 Years. Nobody's Published the Proof.
The 13-years-younger figure comes from a conference talk with no paper behind it, and the sturdier study underneath still can't tell you whether the languages did anything at all.
Brain & AgingBanned in 1979, 'Legacy' PCBs Are Now Tied to Shorter Telomeres in Children
Dioxin-like PCBs left American factories decades ago and never left children's bodies. New research traces how they may erode the protective caps on kids' chromosomes, and may help explain lower cognitive scores.
Brain & AgingThe Marmoset Under Salk's Claim That Brain Waves Build the Reality You See
A Salk lab says the electrical waves rolling across your cortex are a generative engine that builds what you see. The catch: the splashy new paper is a review, and the experiments under it are marmosets squinting at faint dots.
Brain & AgingBracing for a Fall That Hasn't Happened Yet: The Bargain the Aging Ankle Strikes
Falls kill more older Americans than any other injury, and a study of 107 walkers points at the body's own defense: the aging ankle appears to brace for stability, buying it with a shorter, slower, more tiring stride.
Brain & AgingAny Amount of Midlife Movement Tracked With Slower Brain Decline, Most Clearly in Mexican American Adults
In a San Antonio cohort followed since 1979, any physical activity in midlife tracked with slower brain decline, and the link showed up most clearly in the Mexican American adults Alzheimer's research keeps leaving out.
Brain & AgingThe Craving Brake Nobody Mapped: How GLP-1 Drugs Quiet Cravings From the Lateral Septum
The anti-craving effect pushing people to use a diabetes shot off-label against drinking traces to a brain region built to inhibit, not to reward, and the human evidence is still just two small trials deep.
Brain & AgingFor Twenty Years, Women Were Warned That Estrogen Raised Their Dementia Risk. Stanford's Autopsies Point the Other Way.
A randomized federal trial spent two decades warning that hormone therapy raised older women's dementia risk. A Stanford autopsy study just found the opposite association. The catch: both studied women who started the drug far too late to settle it.
Brain & AgingThis Week's Autism 'Breakthrough': A Rare Mutation, an Injection Into Mice, and Not One Human Patient
An injection that silences one gene rescued social behavior in mutant mice and a dish of human cells. The headlines called it an autism therapy. No autistic person has received it, and the gene it targets is mutated in a small fraction of cases.
Brain & AgingThey Measured the Forever Chemicals in the Umbilical Cord Itself. The Babies With the Most Scored Lower at Two.
Scientists skipped the usual stand-in and measured the forever chemicals in the umbilical cord blood itself. By age two, the babies carrying more of them scored lower on communication and motor development, and the companies that made these chemicals knew the risk for decades.
Brain & AgingThe Stress Hormone Was Already High Before Daily Cannabis Users Woke Up
Oregon State measured the morning stress hormone in 39 daily users and 43 non-users. The people reaching for cannabis to unwind started every day with cortisol already running higher, and it tracked with the cannabis-related consequences they reported.
Brain & AgingEurope's Wildfire Smoke Has a Second Blast Radius: Stopped Hearts and Mood-Disorder ER Visits Far From the Flames
When California's wildfire PM2.5 climbed, depression ED visits rose 15 percent and mood-disorder visits 29 percent up to a week later, and per microgram that smoke was tied to larger health effects than ordinary city smog.
Brain & AgingChemists Cracked Unsorted Plastic Into Hydrogen With Lye, and Trapped Three-Quarters of the Carbon Instead of Torching It
Most plastic never gets recycled. It gets burned or buried, and polyethylene keeps turning up in human brain tissue. A UCLA and Ewha team cracked mixed, unsorted trash into more than 90 percent pure hydrogen at low heat and trapped 75 percent of the carbon instead of letting it escape.
Brain & AgingChristof Koch Bet a Case of Wine That Science Would Find Consciousness in the Brain by 2023. He Lost.
At a symposium in Portugal, the neuroscientist who spent 25 years hunting consciousness inside the brain conceded the field's central promise is still unpaid, and floated that consciousness might be fundamental to reality rather than manufactured by neurons.
Brain & AgingThe Fat Molecule That Rides From Your Waistline to Your Brain, and Feeds Alzheimer's Once It Gets There
In obese mice, a membrane fat called phosphatidylethanolamine packed into tiny vesicles, rode to the brain, and sabotaged the immune cells that clear amyloid. An investigational drug reversed it, in mice.
Brain & AgingSame Diet, Same 15 Pounds: Only the Women Who Ate in an 8-Hour Window Got Sharper
Two groups of older women cut the same calories and lost the same 15 pounds over six months. The ones who packed eating into an 8-hour window still scored better on problem-solving, from a 47-person pilot that hasn't been peer-reviewed.
Brain & AgingThe Sweeteners Sold to Diabetics as the Safe Swap Tracked With Faster Brain Aging
Brazilian researchers followed 12,772 adults for eight years. The ones consuming the most artificial sweeteners, about a diet soda's worth a day, showed cognitive decline equal to 1.6 extra years of brain aging, and diabetics fared worst.
Brain & AgingAnti-Tau Alzheimer's Drugs Keep Hitting Their Target and Missing the Disease
Tau is the new headliner at the Alzheimer's conference, but the anti-tau antibodies keep proving they bind the protein while doing nothing for patients. The clearest win so far is a blood test.
Brain & AgingYour First Pregnancy Rewires the Brain for One Baby. Your Second Rewires It for the Chaos of Two.
Amsterdam researchers scanned 110 women and found each pregnancy leaves its own mark, and the brain changes tied to maternal depression showed up months earlier the second time around.
Brain & AgingBerlin Physicists Bolted a Metamaterial to a 7-Tesla MRI, and the Living Eye Came Into Focus
It clips onto a 7-tesla scanner a hospital already owns, draws no extra power, and lifted the signal inside a living human eye by up to half.
Brain & AgingFor Thirty Years the Model Said Blue Cones Drift Out of Sharp Vision. They Were Turning Into Red and Green.
Johns Hopkins researchers grew human retinas in a dish and watched blue cones convert into the red and green cones behind sharp central vision. The three-decade-old migration model was wrong.
Brain & AgingYour Retina Starts Failing Before Any Scan Can See It. Now Someone Wants to Turn That Into a Panel.
Delayed dark adaptation flagged people who would develop early macular degeneration three years later. Now an optometrist has folded that finding into a 'retinal reserve' framework, bloodwork and all, that no trial has tested.
Brain & AgingA Brain Full of Plaques and a Mind That Held: The Cells That May Explain Alzheimer's Resilient Third
About a third of people whose brains show the full pathology of Alzheimer's never develop dementia. Dutch researchers say the difference may not be how many young neurons they have, but whether those cells switch on a survival program instead of dying.