Word: braine
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Father Lombardi said the Pope seemed "extremely satisfied" with the meeting and was "well impressed" with Obama, who was "attentive and ready to listen." White House officials said the President hand-delivered a letter to the Pope from Senator Edward Kennedy, who's suffering from an incurable brain tumor, and Obama asked for prayers for the brother of the only Catholic President in American history...
Past studies have shown that patients who have so-called asymptomatic Alzheimer's disease - those who have the hallmark brain lesions and plaques of Alzheimer's disease but no memory loss - also have enlarged neurons, compared with patients who suffer cognitive impairment. Dr. Diego Iacono, a neuropathology fellow at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and the future director of the Brain Bank at Sweden's Karolinska Institute, conducted several such studies in predominantly male populations, but his latest research, the study published in Neurology, demonstrates the same patterns in an entirely female population - of nuns. (See pictures of the sisters...
...collection of studies suggesting that the greater one's initial mental fitness - measured variously as higher educational achievement or high IQ, for example - the better it may be safeguarded in old age. "It's broadly consistent with the notion that if someone starts out with the ability, however their brain is organized, to have a greater set of skills in language and performing other complicated tasks, then maybe that brain is more resistant [later in life]," says Harvard's Hyman. (See the top 10 scientific discoveries...
...exactly the brain builds up resistance to Alzheimer's is, of course, the central question driving legions of researchers. Are some people's brains capable of building detours around damaged neural circuits? Is there a gene that may help certain people rebuild and repair damaged brain tissue better than others can? Iacono suggests that's a strong possibility, pointing to the presence of one particular gene, APOE2, in 30% of patients with asymptomatic Alzheimer's. The next step in his research, he says, is to understand how this gene works...
What researchers are increasingly discovering is that the human brain may contain much more plasticity than they thought. Understanding how it recovers from injury or compensates for damaged tissue may shed light not only on memory disorders, but also on other conditions, such as Parkinson's or Lou Gehrig's disease, Hyman suggests. "That kind of mental flexibility would be an important component to recovery from any kind of damage...