Scientists have developed new technology that moves beyond traditional two-dimensional analysis of body tissue. They have developed a way to use three-dimensional printing to observe tissues in a new way. The work at the Wyss Institute at Harvard University specifically focuses on renal cells, but there’s no telling where else it could go. It also(…)
A study has revealed a racial bias in the two leading genomic databases, used today by leading clinical geneticists, favoring European ancestry. The study was published October 11th in the journal Nature Communications. The principal investigator was Dr. Timothy O’Connor, PhD from the University of Maryland School of Medicine. Other parts of the research team(…)
A new study in the journal Radiology stated that football changes brains of youth players ages eight to thirteen, specifically in the brain’s white matter, after one season, Reuters reported. The brain’s white matter is made up of axons that project from the nerve cell bodies. The axons in the white matter connect the various(…)
A new study is particularly relevant to military soldiers who experience blast-related traumatic brain injury. More than 200,000 U.S. soldiers serving in the Middle East have experienced this type of injury. Researchers from the University of Iowa discovered something that may help with preventing the development of chronic neurological symptoms that can come after injury,(…)
You or your loved one has experienced a brain injury. Maybe it was a mild traumatic brain injury. Or maybe it was a more severe injury that resulted in a coma, and you are waiting for your loved one to wake up. In the meantime, you might wonder about the legal aspects of brain injury.(…)
A team of researchers at the Lawson Health Research Institute discovered a blood test that may be able to detect the presence of a concussion with improved accuracy. The claims are 92 percent accuracy, according to the study in the journal Metabolomics, but we remain highly skeptical of such claims. “The significance of the findings(…)
Our nervous system can be compared to a computer, and when the brain is injured, there can be a breakdown of the computer. This kind of “computer breakdown” will impede the rate that one processes information. Processing information is multifaceted, and many other deficits are related to the simple act of processing information. First, it(…)
Problems with attention and concentration stem from the problems with information processing that we blogged about yesterday. There are multiple facets of attention that we will describe in this blog. The first aspect to attention is focused attention, which can become a problem in brain injury survivors. Focused attention is the capability to focus on(…)
After a head injury, one of the deficits that may be seen is fatigue, which may limit functioning, including cognitive functioning, after the injury. Even in normal people, a lack of sleep can affect negatively the ability to process information. In patients with head injuries, their ability to attend to information and concentrate during the(…)
Frontal lobe injury can cause executive functioning deficits. The term executive functioning deficits deals with goals, time management, and flexibility. If one cannot do those things, the rest of the brain won’t work very well. Imaging studies will show damage to the frontal and prefrontal areas in brain injury. This is consistent with impaired executive(…)