Word: neural
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...move a finger, for example? Do the eyes follow the doctor across the room? The specialist often observes the patient in the presence of family to see if there is any response. Brain scans may show the extent of any damage, particularly after some time has passed and dead neural tissue is replaced by cerebrospinal fluid...
...medications, but nothing seemed to work very well or for very long. Then last June she heard about an experimental treatment being tested at the New York State Psychiatric Institute at Columbia University. It involved aiming a powerful magnet at a spot on the brain to reset the wayward neural circuits that keep Martha, and millions like her, stuck in the downward spiral of depression...
Moreover, it's not the magnetic pulses that affect the brain but the modest electrical currents that the pulses induce--almost like an echo--in the brain's nerve cells. At some frequencies, those electrical currents seem to stimulate neural pathways but at other frequencies inhibit them...
Using a slightly different approach, Dr. Alvaro Pascual-Leone at Harvard Medical School is beginning to see improvements in his stroke patients' speech. Instead of boosting activity in the compensating areas of the brain, Pascual-Leone is trying to disrupt the neural pathways that block recovery. "What the brain tries to do as a first-line response is to shut down activity in damaged areas," he explains. That gives the neurons that are only slightly damaged a chance to recover before coming back online. But in some stroke patients, the inhibitory network never lets up. By weakening those neurons with...
Researchers using MRI brain scans found that some seriously brain-damaged--but not comatose--patients responded to a loved one's voice in patterns of neural activity similar to those of healthy subjects. Such scans may play a key role in future decisions over care for the unconscious...