Neurology Center

According to a major new report from Australia, social and family factors associated with autism are associated with a lower risk of intellectual disability - and vice versa. But why? The paper is from Leonard et al and it's published in PLoS ONE, so it's open access if you want to take a peek. The authors used a database system in the state of Western Australia which allowed them to find out what...

The peripheral nervous system connects the central nervous system with the rest of the body. All motor, sensory and autonomic nerve cells and fibers outside the CNS are generally considered part of the PNS. Specifically, the PNS comprises the ventral (motor) nerve roots, dorsal (sensory) nerve roots, spinal ganglia, and spinal and peripheral nerves, and their endings, as well as a major portion of...

Brain regions that lack a significant blood-brain barrier tend to be midline structures located near ventricular spaces. They include the area postrema, median eminence of the hypothalamus, and neurohypophys...

The blood-brain barrier is not a single barrier, but a composite of many systems that act to control the entry of substances from the blood to the brain: 1. Capillary endothelial cells linked by tight junctions and expressing specialized uptake systems for particular metabolic substrates (e.g., glucose, amino acids) 2. A prominent basement membrane between endothelia and adjacent cells 3. Pericapillary astrocytes with end-feet adjacent to capillaries A similar system exists for the choroidal epithelium...

1. Enhancement of diagnostic possibilities and treatment options 2. More appropriate selection of diagnostic tests and interpretation of test results 3. Prediction of drug side effects and interactions 4. Selection of optimal drug regimens 5. Aid to critical review of novel concepts and therapies 6. Understanding of the rationale for current clinical trials 7. Provision of a background for communicating information to patients and famil...

Here at Neuroskeptic we have closely followed the development of fMRI scanning on fish.But a new study has taken it to the next level by scanning... some cheese.OK, this is not quite true. The study used NMR spectroscopy to analyze the chemistry of some cheeses, in order to measure the effects of different kinds of probiotic bacteria on the composition of the cheese. NMR is the same technology as...

According to the BBC, the British recession and spending cuts are making us all depressed.They found that between 2006 and 2010, prescriptions for SSRI antidepressants rose by 43%. They attribute this to a rise in the rates of depression caused by the financial crisis. OK there are a few caveats, but this is the clear message of an article titled Money woes 'linked to rise in depression'. To get this...

Neurology and psychiatry are related fields - if for no other reason, because neurological disorders can often manifest as, and get misdiagnosed as, psychiatric ones.But what's the borderline between neurology and psychiatry? What makes one disease "neurological" and another "mental"? Are some psychiatric disorders more "neurological" than others?It's a rather philosophical question and you could...

In This Is Spin̈al Tap, British heavy metal god Nigel Tufnel says, in reference to one of his band's less succesful creations:It's such a fine line between stupid and...uh, clever.This is all too true when it comes to science. You can design a breathtakingly clever experiment, using state of the art methods to address a really interesting and important question. And then at the end you realize that...

Just wanted to let everyone know about a blog called 1 boring old man, which is a very poor name as it isn't boring at all.I don't know if it's written by an old man or not, one can only assume so, but whoever writes it, it has got a lot of extremely good stuff about psychiatry and psychiatric drugs. Fans of Daniel Carlat's blog or even former readers of the now seemingly defuct Furious Seasons will...

The search for differences between the brains of men and women has a long and rather confusing history. Any structural differences are small, and their significance is controversial. The one rock-solid finding is that men's brains are slightly bigger on average. Then again, men are slightly bigger on average in general.A new paper just out from Tomasi and Volkow (of cell-phones-affect-brain fame)...

A 45 year old female teacher had a history of severe obsessive-compulsive disorder, along with other problems including ADHD. Her daughter, and many other people in her family, had suffered the same problems and in a few cases had Tourette's Syndrome.But all that changed - when she suffered a stroke. This is according to a brief case report from Drs. Diamond and Ondo of Texas:[she] had a long history...

In Part 1, I discussed a paper by Jerome Wakefield examining the issue of where to draw the line between normal grief and clinical depression.The line moved in the American Psychiatric Association's DSM diagnostic system when the previous DSM-III edition was replaced by the current DSM-IV. Specifically, the "bereavement exclusion" was made narrower.The bereavement exclusion says that you shouldn't...

Depression is black. That's been the view of Western culture ever since the ancient Greeks, with their concept of "melan cholia" (μελαγχολία) - black bile. The idea was that psychological states were associated with particular bodily fluids; melancholy was associated with the "black bile" of the spleen, as opposed to the go-getting, passionate "yellow bile" of the gall-bladderWhat this "black bile"...

A ground-breaking new study reveals the neurological basis of seminal East Coast hip-hop pioneers Run-D.M.C.The study is Diffusion tensor imaging of the hippocampus and verbal memory performance: The RUN DMC Study, and it actually has nothing to do with hip-hop, but it does have one of the best study acronyms I have ever seen.RUN DMC stands for the "Radboud University Nijmegen Diffusion tensor and...

Part 2 is now out here.My cat died on Tuesday. She may have been a manipulative psychopath, but she was a likeable one. She was 18.On that note, here's a paper about bereavement.It's been recognized since forever that clinical depression is similar, in many ways, to the experience of grief. Freud wrote about it in 1917, and it was an ancient idea even then. So psychiatrists have long thought that...

Paroxetine, aka Paxil aka Seroxat, is an SSRI antidepressant.Like other SSRIs, its reputation has see-sawed over time. Hailed as miracle drugs in the 1990s and promoted for everything from depression to "separation anxiety" in dogs, they fell from grace over the past decade.First, concerns emerged over withdrawal symptoms and suicidality especially in young people. Then more recently their antidepressant...

Across at Wired, Amy Wallace has a long but riveting article about Amy Bishop, the neuroscience professor who shot her colleagues at the University of Alabama last year, killing three.It's a fascinating article because of the picture it paints of a killer and it's well worth the time to read. Yet it doesn't really answer the question posed in the title: "What Made This University Scientist Snap?"Wallace...

According to a disturbing BBC news story, South African drug addicts are stealing medication from HIV+ people and using it to get high:'Whoonga' threat to South African HIV patients"Whoonga" is, allegedly, the street name for efavirenz (aka Stocrin), one of the most popular antiretroviral drugs. The pills are apparantly crushed, mixed with marijuana, and smoked for its hallucinogenic effects.This...