RESEARCH NEWS 1998-11-05 Research News It is known that aspirin and sodium salicylate suppress inflammation by inhibiting cyclooxygenase, an enzyme that triggers production of prostaglandin. It has been suspected that these compounds also exert their anti-inflammatory effects thr
RESEARCH NEWS 1998-10-30 Research News It has long been a dogma of neuroscience that the human brain is born with all the neurons it will ever have, and that those neurons must endure for a lifetime. But evidence has been accumulating that this dogma may not strictly be true. Neu
RESEARCH NEWS 1998-10-30 Research News The idea of treating developmental and neurodegenerative disorders by growing new brain cells has taken a major step forward, according to results of two studies appearing in the November issue of Nature Biotechnology. Evan Snyder and collea
RESEARCH NEWS 1998-10-22 Research News Can transgenic mice serve as a truly useful model for studying Alzheimer's disease? Studies of mice expressing an APP gene mutation that causes a form of familial AD have reported no neuronal loss, despite the presence of amyloid plaque
RESEARCH NEWS 1998-10-15 Research News Since the discovery that mutations in the gene for PS1 cause familial Alzheimer's disease, there has been keen interest in investigating the mechanism by which PS1 mutations cause disease. It has been shown that PS1 associates with memb
RESEARCH NEWS 1998-10-14 Research News A study published in last month's Neurology reports that professional soccer players are at significantly higher risk for long-term brain injuries that affect their mental function. These brain injuries result from either heading the ba
RESEARCH NEWS 1998-10-14 Research News A diet rich in certain fruits and vegetables is known to protect against cancer and heart disease, and now a new animal study in the October Journal of Neuroscience suggests nutrition can also stall the decline of brain function that comes w
RESEARCH NEWS 1998-10-13 Research News Estrogen has been shown in recent years to be a possible protective factor in Alzheimer disease, and now new studies suggest it may also protect against the risk of Parkinson's disease. Preliminary data from four studies were presented
RESEARCH NEWS 1998-10-13 Research News Secreted forms of amyloid precursor protein (APP) may play an important role in the formation and consolidation of memory, according to a study published in today's proceedings of the National Academy of Science. Researchers from the Un
RESEARCH NEWS 1998-09-17 Research News Mutations in the enzyme for superoxide dismutase (SOD1) have been linked to 15 to 20 percent of cases of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), leading to a theory that the disease results when the defective enzyme allows super oxide radicals
RESEARCH NEWS 1998-09-12 Research News A mutation in the gene for PAK-3, a molecule that is thought to play a variety of roles in the nervous system, has been implicated in a form of X-chromosome-linked mental retardation affecting one in 100 males. People who have the mutation h
RESEARCH NEWS 1998-09-11 Research News Neuronal growth and synapse formation is regulated by a combination of activity-independent and activity-dependent mechanisms. In today's Science, E. Nedivi et al. describe CPG15, a molecule that enhances dendritic arbor growth in proje
RESEARCH NEWS 1998-09-10 Research News Glutamate is a neurotransmitter that is toxic when too much of it is released by excessive neuronal activity or by brain injury. Some researchers have also proposed that glutamate toxicity drives the neurodegeneration seen in Alzheimer'