Toggle light / dark theme

Mayo Clinic Minute: What you need to know about stroke

Oct. 29 is World Stroke Day. Sometimes called a brain attack, stroke is the second leading cause of death worldwide and the fifth leading cause of death in the U.S. Men and women are at risk of a stroke, but women are more likely to have – and die – of a stroke than men. Dr. Kara Sands, a Mayo Clinic neurologist, says stroke kills twice as many women as breast cancer. The good news is that strokes are preventable, treatable and beatable.

Watch: The Mayo Clinic Minute

Journalists: Broadcast-quality video (0:59) is in the downloads at the end of this post. Please “Courtesy: Mayo Clinic News Network. ”Read the script.

Making “New” Neurons for Recovery After Brain Injury

One of the most intriguing developments in the so-called golden age of neuroscience has been the growing understanding of “neuroplasticity”: the brain’s ability to constantly reshape itself and constantly learn new things by forging new connections throughout one’s lifetime — to grow proportions of gray matter and even shift brain activity to different regions of the brain.

Now a new research effort is taking the concept of neuroplasticity further — looking at diseased and injured brains that have permanently lost neurons. The effort, led by neuroscientist Magdalena Götz, explores whether “astrocytes” — non-neuronal, structural cells in the brain, can be reprogrammed to take up the tasks the neurons once performed.

“Everybody is astonished, at the moment, that it works,” says Nicola Mattugini, a neurobiologist at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Germany, when she presented her team’s results at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in San Diego, California. Their team reprogrammed the astrocytes in lab mice.

Memory loss and mental decline in old age largely decided

By the age of eight, a new study has shown.

Scientists at University College London (UCL) tested the memory and thinking skills of Britons in their late 60s and 70s and compared the results to similar cognitive tests that they took as schoolchildren in 1954.

They found that someone whose cognitive performance was in the top 25 percent as a child, was likely to remain in the top 25 percent at age 70.

The Case Against Reality, a new book

After reading the new book “The Case Against Reality: Why evolution hid the truth from our eyes” by cognitive scientist Donald D. Hoffman, many academics and general readers alike may conclude that the Interface Theory of Perception well might be regarded as the most advanced theory of consciousness to date. If you dare to glance outside the paradigmatic square of neuroscience and neurophilosophy, then this book opens up a brand new perspective shedding light on the most probable future venue of scientific endeavor for the theory of everything with computational underpinnings and revolving around phenomenal consciousness.


Challenging the orthodoxy of still-predominant physicalism with undeniable logic and recent epistemological discoveries, Donald Hoffman crafts out his new Interface Theory of Perception which, for some inexplicable reason has been overlooked for so long and is but self-evident: Each conscious agent inhabits their own virtual bubble-universe while using species-specific sensory-cognitive modality in interfacing with objective reality.

In my recently-published book The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind’s Evolution (2019) I go a step further by submitting to you that “that something in objective reality” (in the words of Hoffman) is nothing less than non-local consciousness, or the Universal Mind if you prefer, co-creating each and every observer timeline. My ‘Experiential Realism’ is Hoffman’s Conscious Realism.

Serum elaidic acid levels tied to dementia, Alzheimer’s disease

Higher serum levels of elaidic acid, an objective biomarker for industrial trans fat, are associated with an increased risk for developing all-cause dementia and Alzheimer disease, according to a study published online Oct. 23 in Neurology.

Takanori Honda, Ph.D., from Kyushu University in Fukuoka, Japan, and colleagues examined the prospective correlation between serum elaidic acid (trans 18:1 n-9) levels and incident dementia in 1,628 Japanese community residents aged 60 years and older without dementia. Participants underwent screening examination in 2002 to 2003 and were followed prospectively to November 2012.

The researchers found that 377 participants developed some type of dementia during follow-up. After adjustment for traditional risk factors, significant correlations were seen for higher serum elaidic acid levels with greater risk for developing all-cause dementia and Alzheimer disease. After adjustment for dietary factors, including total energy intake and intakes of saturated and , these associations remained significant. There was no significant correlation noted for serum elaidic acid levels and vascular dementia.

The Origin of Consciousness in the Brain Is About to Be Tested

Here’s something you don’t hear every day: two theories of consciousness are about to face off in the scientific fight of the century.

Backed by top neuroscientist theorists of today, including Christof Koch, head of the formidable Allen Institute for Brain Research in Seattle, Washington, the fight hopes to put two rival ideas of consciousness to the test in a $20 million project. Briefly, volunteers will have their brain activity scanned while performing a series of cleverly-designed tasks targeted to suss out the brain’s physical origin of conscious thought. The first phase was launched this week at the Society for Neuroscience annual conference in Chicago, a brainy extravaganza that draws over 20,000 neuroscientists each year.

Both sides agree to make the fight as fair as possible: they’ll collaborate on the task design, pre-register their predictions on public ledgers, and if the data supports only one idea, the other acknowledges defeat.

The rise of ‘psychobiotics’? ‘Poop pills’ and probiotics could be game changers for mental illness

The calls started pouring in soon after word spread that Dr. Valerie Taylor was testing fecal microbiota transplantation — transferring poop from one body to another — for bipolar disorder.

The mental health condition is different from depression. It comes with mania, the “up” swings that can make people feel superhuman. “But so many people with depression called wanting to take part in the study we felt we had an obligation to try,” said Taylor, chief of psychiatry at the University of Calgary.

Two years after spearheading the bipolar study, the first of its kind in the world, Taylor has now launched a second study testing fecal transplants in people with depression, as well as a third for depression in people who also have irritable bowel syndrome.

Genetic correlations between pain phenotypes and depression and neuroticism

Correlations between pain phenotypes and psychiatric traits such as depression and the personality trait of neuroticism are not fully understood. In this study, we estimated the genetic correlations of eight pain phenotypes (defined by the UK Biobank, n = 151,922–226,683) with depressive symptoms, major depressive disorders and neuroticism using the cross-trait linkage disequilibrium score regression (LDSC) method integrated in the LD Hub. We also used the LDSC software to calculate the genetic correlations among pain phenotypes. All pain phenotypes, except hip pain and knee pain, had significant and positive genetic correlations with depressive symptoms, major depressive disorders and neuroticism. All pain phenotypes were heritable, with pain all over the body showing the highest heritability (h2 = 0.31, standard error = 0.072). Many pain phenotypes had positive and significant genetic correlations with each other indicating shared genetic mechanisms. Our results suggest that pain, neuroticism and depression share partially overlapping genetic risk factors.