Summary: Researchers have identified two genetic risk factors for Alzheimer’s disease in African Americans. Source: Boston University Medical Center. New research has uncovered two genetic risk loci associated with late-onset Alzheimer’s disease (AD) in African Americans. Published online in Alzheimer’s & Dementia, the study pinpoints variants near the genes COBL and SLC10A2 and highlights a … Read more

Summary: New research shows that cognitive deficits in psychotic disorders—including schizophrenia and bipolar disorder—are linked to how brain networks are organized. Crucially, this brain–cognition relationship appears before the first psychotic episode in people at clinical high risk, revealing potential pathways for earlier diagnosis and targeted intervention. The findings describe a reproducible brain network signature associated … Read more

Summary: A new clinical study finds that short-term sleep loss can change the composition of gut bacteria previously associated with obesity and type 2 diabetes in humans. Source: Uppsala University. New clinical results from Uppsala University indicate that restricting sleep alters the relative abundance of specific gut bacteria linked to impaired metabolic health. The study … Read more

Summary: New research identifies disrupted intracellular transport in neurons as a key contributor to Parkinson’s disease. Source: University of Erlangen-Nuremberg. Traffic jams in nerve cells linked to Parkinson’s disease Researchers at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) report that interruptions in the cellular transport system of nerve cells — comparable to traffic jams — can trigger the degeneration … Read more

Summary: Researchers have identified LIPE, a triglyceride-degrading lipase that releases fatty acids, as a promising new target for developing Parkinson’s disease therapies. Source: Brigham and Women’s Hospital The human brain is rich in lipids. Lipids and fatty acids are integral to membrane structure, signaling, energy balance and many cellular processes. Alpha-synuclein, a protein centrally involved … Read more

Summary: Researchers have mapped how developing neurons exit the germinal zone, a vital step for building accurate brain circuits. They describe a coordinated “push–pull” system in which the guidance cue Netrin-1 drives differentiated neurons away from the germinal zone, while the ubiquitin ligase Siah2 prevents immature cells from leaving too early by degrading proteins essential … Read more

Certain synapses in the brain may play a crucial role in anorexia, bulimia, binge eating disorder, and obesity. More than six decades after researchers discovered that electrical stimulation of a particular brain region could trigger eating in mice regardless of hunger, scientists at the UNC School of Medicine have identified the specific cellular connections responsible … Read more

Summary: Infants who were later diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) at 24 months showed measurable differences in brain regions responsible for visual processing as early as six months of age, according to a new NIH-funded study. Source: NIH Researchers found that infants who went on to receive an ASD diagnosis at 24 months already … Read more

Summary: Not everyone remembers their dreams, and a new study explains why. Researchers found that dream recall is strongly influenced by a person’s attitude toward dreams, their tendency to mind-wander, and specific sleep characteristics. These factors together help explain why some people wake with vivid dream memories while others do not. People who place greater … Read more

Summary: New research shows that a single session of running heightens the brain’s responsiveness to food-related cues, even though it can temporarily reduce how hungry people feel. Researchers using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) found that running increased activity in brain areas involved in attention, anticipating reward, and episodic memory when participants viewed images of … Read more