More men than women develop Parkinson’s disease and new work presented at the Federation of European Neuroscience Societies says that it is do to sex differences in how brain cells change. Parkinson’s disease affects about 9 million people and becomes increasingly prevalent with age.
After a stroke, there is inflammation in the damaged part of the brain. Until now, the inflammation has been seen as a negative consequence that needs to be abolished as soon as possible. But, as it turns out, there are also some positive sides to the inflammation, and it can actually help the brain to self-repair.
"This is in total contrast to our previous beliefs", says Professor Zaal Kokaia from Lund University in Sweden.
Working women who want to minimize career income losses related to motherhood should wait until they are about 30 years old to have their first children, suggests new research from Washington University in St. Louis.
The findings, published in PLOS ONE, hold true regardless of whether a woman has earned a college degree.
For college graduates and those without a college degree, the researchers found lower lifetime incomes for women who gave birth for the first time at age 30 or younger. The hit was particularly stark for women without college degrees who had their first children before age 25.
ITHACA, N.Y. - Using the latest computer game technology, a Cornell-led team of physicists has come up with a "suitably beautiful" explanation to a puzzle that has baffled researchers in the materials and theoretical physics communities for a century.
Physics professor James Sethna has co-authored a paper on the unusual microstructure of smectics - liquid crystals whose molecules are arranged in layers and form ellipses and hyperbolas - and their similarity to martensites, a crystalline structure of steel.
In fact, Sethna and his cohorts have termed smectic liquids "the world's weirdest martensite."
Women are closing the education gap with men, but a global study of gender equality shows these advances are failing to bring equal access to quality jobs and government representation.
The study, which explored decades of data from more than 150 countries, finds that women have reached 91 percent of the education that men have - but only 70 percent of their rate of employment, and just 25 percent of political representation.
The findings challenge the assumption that education--a hallmark of international development efforts--translates into equal access to high-paying jobs, and suggest greater policy interventions are required to close political and workplace gender gaps.
High-volume lung transplant centers have lower transplantation costs and their patients are less likely to be readmitted within 30 days of leaving the hospital following surgery, according to a new study of more than 3,000 Medicare patients who received lung transplants.
"The Effect of Transplant Center Volume on Cost and Readmission in Medicare Lung Transplant Recipients" was published online ahead of print in the Annals of the American Thoracic Society.
Previous research established that patient survival is higher at high-volume lung transplant centers. It is unknown, however, whether these better outcomes require more resources or result from better care delivery that might require fewer resources.
University of Texas at Arlington researchers have found that by age 3 environmental influences such as parenting are relevant factors in the development of toddlers' self-control when they are asked not to do something they want to do, such as run into the street or eat a forbidden snack.
"Understanding the development of self-control mechanisms is vital as individuals with low levels of inhibitory control develop more cognitive and socio-emotional development issues, including attention deficit hyperactivity disorder or ADHD," said Jeffrey Gagne, an assistant professor of psychology in UTA's College of Science and co-author of the study.
COLUMBIA, Mo. - Standard treatment for prostate cancer can include chemotherapy that targets receptors on cancer cells. However, drug-resistant cancer cells can emerge during chemotherapy, limiting its effectiveness as a cancer-fighting agent. Researchers at the University of Missouri have proven that a compound initially developed as a cholesterol-fighting molecule not only halts the progression of prostate cancer, but also can kill cancerous cells.
DURHAM, N.C. -- It's a long-simmering debate in juvenile justice: Do young offenders become worse because of their experience with the justice system, or are they somehow different than people who don't have their first criminal conviction until later in life?
"There seems to be a lot of evidence that people who are convicted early are more heavily involved in crime," says postdoctoral researcher Amber Beckley at Duke University, who has a new study out on the topic that appears online in the Journal of Criminal Justice.
Using data from a study that has tracked nearly 1,000 New Zealanders from birth to age 38, Beckley looked at patterns that would distinguish youthful offenders from what she calls "adult-onset offenders."
New York, NY, April 14, 2016. In a recent study, researchers found evidence of a compromised dopamine system in heavy users of marijuana. Lower dopamine release was found in the striatum - a region of the brain that is involved in working memory, impulsive behavior, and attention. Previous studies have shown that addiction to other drugs of abuse, such as cocaine and heroin, have similar effects on dopamine release, but such evidence for cannabis was missing until now.
RIVERSIDE, Calif. - Research strongly suggests that sleep, which constitutes about a third of our lives, is crucial for learning and forming long-term memories. But exactly how such memory is formed is not well understood and remains, despite considerable research, a central question of inquiry in neuroscience.
Neuroscientists at the University of California, Riverside report this week in the Journal of Neuroscience that they now may have an answer to this question. Their study provides for the first time a mechanistic explanation for how deep sleep (also called slow-wave sleep) may be promoting the consolidation of recent memories.
The University of Exeter Medical School has led an analysis of more than 3,000 people in Scotland who each had blood pressure measurements taken from both arms, published today in the British Journal of General Practice. Researchers say the findings show the importance of routinely measuring blood pressure in both arms.
SEATTLE-- Global inequities in health spending are expected to persist and intensify over the next 25 years, according to a new study that estimates total health financing in countries around the world.
Published in The Lancet on April 13, 2016 "National spending on health by source for 184 countries
between 2013 and 2040" draws from a joint research collaboration between the World Bank Group and the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington.
