Monthly Archives: August 2012

The authors of this paper outline their model of high trait anxiety and anxiety disorder which they associate with a particular pattern of functional network dysfunction. This involves increased functioning of the cingulo-opercular and ventral attention networks with decreased functioning … Continue reading →

The authors of this study found that learning to play a musical instrument during childhood for a relatively short period (approximately 3 years) may result in neural changes that persist in adulthood after auditory training has ceased (approximately 7 years … Continue reading →

This study compared parent and offspring genotypes in 78 sets of Icelandic families and revealed a strong influence of paternal age on spontaneous DNA mutation in offspring.  They found that a newborn’s DNA contains an average of 60 new small-scale … Continue reading →

Amyloid plaques are formed from beta amyloid peptide aggregates and occur at presymptomatic stages of Alzheimer’s disease. However, the temporal relationship between plaque formation and neuronal dysfunction is not yet well understood. To study this, different variants of human amyloid … Continue reading →

This review examines the growing experimental data pointing to chronic bacterial and viral infections as possible risk factors for neurodegenerative diseases. These include Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease among others. Viral and microbial agents have been observed to produce molecular changes … Continue reading →

To study longitudinal changes that culminate in symptomatic disease, 128 participants with a family history of dominantly inherited Alzheimer disease underwent baseline clinical and cognitive assessments, brain imaging, and cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) and blood tests. Autosomal dominant Alzheimer’s disease has … Continue reading →

The relationship of cognitive performance to stress is described by an inverted U-shaped Yerkes-Dodson curve. This relationship is partially mediated by release of dopamine and/or norepinephrine, with downstream effects on cyclic AMP signaling through Gs protein coupled receptors. Cyclic AMP … Continue reading →

β-Amyloid peptide is widely held to have a deleterious role in Alzheimer’s disease. β-Amyloid 42 (Aβ42) and β-amyloid 40 (Aβ40), major components of senile plaque deposits in Alzheimer’s disease, are considered neurotoxic and proinflammatory. Therefore it is an unexpected surprise … Continue reading →

Activated brain microglia are thought to play a major role in cortical gray matter demyelination in multiple sclerosis. PK11195, a positron emission tomography (PET) ligand, can be used to quantify microglial activation in vivo. Using PK11195 binding and PET, this … Continue reading →