High levels of dietary salt can activate a pathway in the brain to cause cognitive impairment, according to a new study.
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Scientists have been developing astounding new tools for exploring neural circuits that underlie brain function throughout the first five years of the National Institutes of Health’s Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies® (BRAIN) Initiative. Now, the NIH has announced its continued support for these projects by funding over 180 new BRAIN Initiative awards, bringing the total 2019 budget for the program to more than $424 million.
With support from the National Institutes of Health’s Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies® (BRAIN) Initiative, scientists are developing powerful new devices and technologies to monitor and regulate brain activity.
Using advanced imaging, researchers have uncovered new information regarding traumatic microbleeds, which appear as small, dark lesions on MRI scans after head injury but are typically too small to be detected on CT scans.
Between 1999 and 2017, the United States experienced a 10-fold increase in the number of people who died from overdoses of Valium and other benzodiazepines. For years, scientists thought that these powerful sedatives, which are used to treat anxiety, muscle spasms, and sleeping disorders, worked alone to calm nerves.
Rapid eye movement, or REM, sleep is a fascinating period when most of our dreams are made. Now, in a study of mice, a team of Japanese and U.S. researchers show that it may also be a time when the brain actively forgets.
Affecting at least 14,000 Americans, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a paralyzing and highly fatal neurodegenerative disorder for which there are no effective treatments. Scientists peered inside neurons and watched the workings of annexin A11, a gene linked to a rare form of ALS.
Recently the National Institutes of Health called on researchers to make the standards and practices for conducting early stage, or preclinical, medical research on animals more like those used for clinical trials.
In a nationwide study, researchers used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to scan the brains of hundreds of participants in the National Institutes of Health’s Systolic Blood Pressure Intervention Trial (SPRINT) and found that intensively controlling a person’s blood pressure was more effective at slowing the accumulation of white matter lesions than standard treatment of high blood pressure.
NIH study provides hope for diagnosing and testing effectiveness of new treatments for more disabling forms of multiple sclerosis
Aided by a high-powered brain scanner and a 3D printer, NIH researchers peered inside the brains of hundreds of multiple sclerosis patients and found that dark rimmed spots representing ongoing, “smoldering” inflammation, called chronic active lesions, may be a hallmark of more aggressive and disabling forms of the disease.