Syndicated from Amen Clinics Blog.

Dr. Amens' Current Articles

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Syndicated from NY Times – Health.

NY Times Health

1. Robotic Technology to Help Understand and Treat Strokes
   January 13, 2012, 5:00 am
   - Dr. Julius Dewald is trying to meld medicine, science and engineering to better understand paralysis from strokes and how robotic therapy might help people.
2. After a Brain Injury, Relearning Who You Are
   October 17, 2011, 4:00 am
   - A reader responds to a Sunday review article on recovering from a traumatic brain injury.
3. Treatment for Trauma From Brain Injuries Needs More Study, Panel Says
   October 12, 2011, 4:00 am
   - Techniques used to treat traumatic brain injuries, the wounds suffered by many troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, lack rigorous scientific support, a government-appointed panel found.
4. Brain Injury and Building a New Life Afterwards
   October 9, 2011, 4:00 am
   - After a traumatic brain injury, learning about chewing gum and the friends I no longer recognize.
5. Concern About Brain Surgery for Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder
   February 15, 2011, 5:00 am
   - A recent paper argues that a treatment for obsessive-compulsive disorder has not been sufficiently tested, and that even calling it “therapy” raises people’s hopes beyond what is scientifically supportable.
6. Giffords Recovery Is Continuing, Friends Say
   February 14, 2011, 5:00 am
   - From mouthing words to speaking, Representative Gabrielle Giffords is on the slow road to recovery.
7. Brain Injury Recovery That Lies Ahead for Giffords
   January 24, 2011, 5:00 am
   - Two years ago, Mark Steinhubl began the recovery process that lies ahead for Gabrielle Giffords, at the rehabilitation center she will enter.
8. Neurofeedback Gains Popularity and Second Looks
   October 5, 2010, 4:00 am
   - Practitioners say the procedure can address a host of neurological ills — among them attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, autism, depression and anxiety. But some scientists denounce it.
9. After Injury, Fighting to Regain a Sense of Self
   August 9, 2009, 4:00 am
   - Scientists are investigating delusions caused by brain trauma for clues to one of the most confounding problems in brain science: identity.
10. Head Games
    September 13, 2008, 4:00 am
    - Most high schools and colleges fail to provide athletes who sustain sports-related concussions with the necessary testing needed for a full recovery.

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Syndicated from Sharpbrains Peak Performance Blog.

SharpBrains Peak Performance

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Syndicated from Scientific American – Mind and Brain.

Scientific American Mind & Brain

1. How Emotions Jump from Face to Face
   February 7, 2012, 4:15 pm
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   Disability advocates were seeing red after two elderly women with medical conditions were allegedly strip-searched by TSA agents at New York’s JFK airport last December. You’d have to have a pretty thick skin not to empathize with an elderly, wheelchair-bound woman having her colostomy bag frisked. But the notion of one passenger being an unlikely terrorist also belies a discomfiting flipside: another passenger being a more likely candidate.

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2. Thinking About Mortality Changes How We Act
   February 6, 2012, 3:00 pm
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   The thought of shuffling off our mortal coil can make all of us a little squeamish. But avoiding the idea of death entirely means ignoring the role it can play in determining our actions. Consider the following scenario:

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3. Brain Injury Rate 7 Times Greater among U.S. Prisoners
   February 4, 2012, 1:00 pm
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   A car accident, a rough tackle, an unexpected tumble. The number of ways to bang up the brain are almost as numerous as the people who sustain these injuries. And only recently has it become clear just how damaging a seemingly minor knock can be. Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is no longer just a condition acknowledged in military personnel or football players and other professional athletes. Each year some 1.7 million civilians will suffer an injury that disrupts the function of their brains, qualifying it as a TBI.

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4. Lies We Tell Ourselves: How Deception Leads to Self-Deception (preview)
   February 4, 2012, 1:00 pm
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   In Andrew Lloyd Webber’s 1970 rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar , a skeptical Judas Iscariot questions with faux innocence (“Don’t you get me wrong/I only want to know”) the messiah’s deific nature: “Jesus Christ Superstar/Do you think you’re what they say you are?”

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5. Social Clicks: Sounds Associated with African Languages Are Common in English
   February 3, 2012, 1:00 pm
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   Some Africans click, but English speakers don’t. That’s been the conventional wisdom about click sounds, which serve as regular consonants in Zulu and Xhosa and a few other African languages but which were presumed to just be used in English for encouraging a horse, imitating a kiss, or expressing emotions such as disapproval or amazement. But researchers have recently found that clicks are far more prevalent in the world’s lingua franca than had been thought.

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6. MIND Reviews: The Righteous Mind
   February 3, 2012, 1:00 pm
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   The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion [More]
   
   
   

7. What a Yawn Says about Your Relationship
   January 31, 2012, 7:00 pm
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   You can tell a lot about a person from their body. And I don’t just mean how many hours they spend at the gym, or how easy it is for them to sweet-talk their way out of speeding tickets. For the past several decades researchers have been studying the ways in which the body reveals properties of the mind. An important subset of this work has taken this idea a step further: do the ways our bodies relate to one another tell us about the ways in which our minds relate to one another? Consider behavioral mimicry. Many studies have found that we quite readily mimic the nonverbal behavior of those with whom we interact. Furthermore, the degree to which we mimic others is predicted by both our personality traits as well as our relationship to those around us. In short , the more empathetic we are, the more we mimic, and the more we like the people we’re interacting with, the more we mimic. The relationship between our bodies reveals something about the relationship between our minds.

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8. Scientists Manipulate and Erase Memories (preview)
   January 26, 2012, 1:00 pm
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   Joël Coutu knelt on the cold cement floor of the pet supply store he managed in Montreal, his wrists bound behind him with telephone wire. He could feel the barrel of a pistol pressed against the back of his neck. “You’re lying!” the gunman screamed. “And I am going to blow your head off.”

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9. U.S. Science Degrees Are Up
   January 25, 2012, 1:00 pm
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10. The Power of Introverts: A Manifesto for Quiet Brilliance
    January 24, 2012, 4:40 pm
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    Do you enjoy having time to yourself, but always feel a little guilty about it? Then Susan Cain’s “ Quiet : The Power of Introverts ” is for you. It’s part book, part manifesto. We live in a nation that values its extroverts – the outgoing, the lovers of crowds – but not the quiet types who change the world. She recently answered questions from Mind Matters editor Gareth Cook .

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Syndicated from Discover Magazine Mind and Brain News.

Discover Magazine Mind and Brain

1. How Did LEGO Become More About Limits Than Possibilities? | DISCOVER
   February 3, 2012, 2:30 pm
   -

   No matter what you do with it, it'll still look like Hogwarts.

   Rip open that new LEGO set and your mind races at the possibilities! A simple repertoire of piece types, and yet you can build a ninja boat, a three-wheeled race car, a pineapple pizza, a spotted lion… The possibilities are limited only by your creativity and imagination. “Combine and create!”—that was the implicit war cry for LEGOs.

   So how, I wonder, did LEGO so severely lose its way? LEGO now fills the niche that model airplanes once did when I was a kid, an activity whose motto would be better described as “Follow the instructions!” The sets kids receive as gifts today are replete with made-to-order piece types special to each set, useful in one particular spot, and often useless elsewhere. And the sets are designed for constructing some particular thing (a Geonosian Starfighter, a Triceratops Trapper, etc.), and you—the parent—can look forward to spending hours helping them through the thorough yet thoroughly exhausting pages.

   LEGO appears to be doing very well for itself, and there’s no shame in helping to revolutionize model-building (and there’s an elegance to snapping together one’s models rather than gluing them together). But one has to wonder whether, at some deep philosophical level, the new LEGOs really are LEGOs at all, as they’re no longer the paragon of creative construction they once were and with which they’re still associated.

   In fact, as I was bemoaning my kids’ LEGOs with the Guardian's Roger Highfield (and later with WIRED's Samuel Arbesman), it struck me that I have such data on LEGOs...

   
   

2. Alzheimer’s Spreads Like a Virus From Neuron to Neuron, Studies Show | 80beats
   February 3, 2012, 1:30 pm
   -

   
   A protein tangle in an Alzheimer’s-afflicted neuron

   Exactly how Alzheimer’s disease proliferates through the brain, overtaking one region after another, has eluded scientists. As the disease progresses, tau—a malformed protein that forms snarls and tangles inside neurons—shows up in more and more brain areas. Researchers have wondered whether tau, and the disease, are working their way out from a single area of origin or mounting numerous, distinct attacks on vulnerable parts of the brain. Two new studies in mice provide strong support for the first idea: Tau seems to pass from affected cells to their neighbors, spreading much the same way a virus or bacteria infection would.

   The studies—one recently published in PLoS ONE, the other forthcoming in Neuron—used mice genetically engineered to produce abnormal human tau protein in the entorhinal cortex, the tiny bit of brain tissue where Alzheimer’s first appears in most patients. Since those cells, but not others, were equipped to produce human tau, any tau that showed up elsewhere in the brain could be traced back to the entorhinal cortex. The researchers watched and waited, and found that the tau proteins spread through neural circuits out ...

   
   

3. Does a Chinese Boy Really Have “Cat Eyes” That See in the Dark? | 80beats
   February 2, 2012, 11:23 pm
   -

   The strangest thing about this Chinese boy’s light blue eyes is not their color. It’s the purported fact that he can see in the dark. His eyes are just like cat eyes, glowing blue-green when you shine a light in them, says this clip from China’s state-run English TV channel. The boy can catch crickets in the dark without a flashlight and even completes a writing test in a pitch-black stairwell. True, or too good to be?

   Natalie Wolchover at Life’s Little Mysteries has rounded up some experts and their collective reaction seems to be, “Hmm…” (It doesn’t help that this video has been posted on YouTube under the name, “Alien Hybrid or Starchild Discovered in China? 2012.”) One possibility they consider is whether the boy has a mutation that produced something like a tapetum lucidum, an extra layer of tissue that helps cats see in the dark. James Reynolds, a pediatric ophthalmologist at State University of New York in Buffalo, puts a stop to that idea:

   [T]here is no single genetic mutation that could produce a fully formed and functioning tapetum lucidum, Reynolds explained; such an ability would require multiple mutations, which wouldn’t occur all at once. Evolution happens incrementally, ...

   
   

4. Abnormal brain structures hint at poor self-control and vulnerability to drug addiction | Not Exactly Rocket Science
   February 2, 2012, 7:00 pm
   - Our lives are full of instances where have to hold ourselves back. We stop ourselves from eating that tempting slice of cake to avoid putting on weight. We bite our tongues to avoid insulting our friends. We slam on the brakes to avoid killing a pedestrian.  To quote Yoda: “Control! Control! You must learn control.” [...]
5. The Strange German Disease Called “Kevinism”: Can a Lame Name Mess Up Your Life? | Discoblog
   February 1, 2012, 1:33 pm
   -

    Young German Kevins are a few decades behind the U.S. trend.

   Another day, another crazy German noun: Kevinismus, which basically means, “You’re named Kevin? Sucks to be you.” According to a study of interactions on the German dating site eDarling, online daters don’t even bother to click on the profiles of users with names that seem foreign and gauche to German ears, like Kevin. The authors suggest that this online neglect due to their unpopular names mirrors lifelong social neglect, which is also responsible for making Kevins smoke more, get less education, and have lower self-esteem.

   That all sounds quite dire, but we’re gonna have to bust out the “correlation does not imply causation” card here. While exotic baby names may seem like a disease that most commonly afflicts celebrities, in Germany it’s really about the other end of the economic spectrum. An article on Kevinism [note: this article contains a lot of German] in Die Welt quotes sociologist Jürgen Gerhards, who asserts that Anglo-American names (Mandy, Justin, Angelina to name a few more) are a lower-class phenomenon. It seems that no one has actually crunched the numbers to prove that, but jokes like “Only druggies and ...

   
   

6. Big Idea: Seeing Crime Before It Happens | DISCOVER
   January 23, 2012, 5:00 pm
   -

   This past summer, at an undisclosed location in a northeastern metropolis, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was trying to predict the future. There were no psychics or crystal balls, just a battery of sensors designed to determine human intention through the subtlest of changes in heart rate, gaze, and other physiological markers.

   Together, the sensors are called Future Attribute Screening Technology, or FAST, a $20 million federal project that aims to highlight airport passengers whose bodies betray hostile intentions. In theory, fast has the potential to detect terrorists in the final minutes before they act, but critics warn that the system may have other consequences, such as flagging innocent travelers through false positives while letting some with ill intent sneak by through false negatives. The DHS, for its part, maintains that fast is merely improving on a far older and more fallible crime predictor: human judgment.

   About 3,000 DHS officers already roam the nation’s airports scanning for suspicious behavior and facial expressions in a program called Screening of Passengers by Observational Techniques, or SPOT. The automated fast system is intended to supplement SPOT by catching signals that are undetectable to the naked eye. fast is not designed to replace the decision-making of human screeners, but government officials hope it will eventually be able to passively scan airport passengers and single out those worth pulling aside for additional screening...

   
   

7. Primed by expectations – why a classic psychology experiment isn’t what it seemed | Not Exactly Rocket Science
   January 18, 2012, 10:00 pm
   - In the early 20th century, the world was captivated by a mathematical horse called Clever Hans. He could apparently perform basic arithmetic, keep track of a calendar and tell the time. When his owner, Wilhelm von Osten, asked him a question, Hans would answer by tapping out the correct number with his hoof. Eventually, it [...]
8. Go Ahead and Gossip—Science Says It’s the Right Thing to Do | Discoblog
   January 18, 2012, 6:58 pm
   -

   
   He did what? Innnnteresting…

   Thorough scientific study has revealed that lots of supposed vices can have surprising upsides: alcohol, sex, caffeine. Thanks to UC Berkeley researchers, we can now add another so-bad-but-oh-so-good habit to the list: Gossip, their new study suggests, can be a selfless act of public service.

   Surreptitiously passing along the news that someone has behaved badly—what’s technically called “prosocial gossip”—can relieve stress, as well as warn others to regard the rule-breaker with a wary eye, the researchers say. (The study didn’t look directly at other forms of gossip—rumormongering, telling lies, anything said to a confessional cam on reality TV—so make of that what you will.)

   In one experiment, the scientists found that people’s heart rates spiked when they saw one of two people playing a game cheating, but calmed again when they had the chance to jot a note, middle school-style, to the next competitor about what they’d seen. “Spreading information about the person whom they had seen behave badly tended to make people feel better, quieting the frustration that drove their gossip,” one of the researchers said in a statement—scientific confirmation of that scratching-a-lingering-itch feeling of relief we get from clucking our tongues ...

   
   

9. Research on Quebec’s Rare Brain Disease Could Help Unravel the Common Ones | 80beats
   January 17, 2012, 7:56 pm
   -

   Artist’s rendering of a mitochondrian, the energy-producing
   cellular structure affected by ARSACS

   Scientists have pinpointed the cause of a rare, fatal neurodegenerative disorder called ARSACS, or autosomal recessive spastic ataxia of Charlevoix-Saguenay. The disease is due to defects in neuron’s mitochondria, the bit of biological machinery that generates energy for the cell—a structure known to be affected in Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and other neurological diseases, as well.

   ARSACS was first observed in the descendants of a small group of 17th century French settlers who made their homes near the Charlevoix and Saguenay rivers in what is now Quebec, and has since been seen worldwide. But its incidence remains unusually high in that particular French Canadian community, with 1 in 1,500 to 2,000 people developing ARSACS and 1 in 23 people unaffected genetic carriers of the disease.

   The first symptoms of ARSACS appear in early childhood, often as a two- or three-year-old learns to walk, a skill that—because the disease primarily affects the cerebellum, the brain’s motor control center—those suffering from ARSACS never master. As the disease progresses, it leads to muscle weakness, slurred speech, and difficulty coordinating or controlling movement. People with ARSACS ...

   
   

10. Impatient Futurist: Science Finds a Better Way to Teach Science | DISCOVER
    January 17, 2012, 7:00 pm
    -

    Teaching well is hard. i can cite my direct observations of the hundreds of victims of my occasional efforts over the years as a teacher of physics and writing. As I have stood lecturing brilliantly to a few dozen purportedly eager collegians, it has not escaped my attention that at any one time only three or four seem awake enough to keep up with their text messaging.

    Clearly the problem is not the content or presentation style of my lecturing, which, as I may have neglected to mention, is brilliant, or so I was once assured by a student who stayed after class to ask for a sixth extension on an assignment. Then again, from what I recall of my college days, I wasn’t exactly on the edge of my seat at my professors’ lectures, either. And most of my fellow lecturers don’t report much different. Could the problem be with the nature of lecturing itself?

    To find some answers, I posed this question directly to Carl Wieman, associate director for science at the Office of Science and Technology Policy at the White House. Wieman, to be blunt, knows zero. In fact, he won a Nobel Prize for his extraordinarily low achievement. During the mid-1990s in a University of Colorado physics lab, Wieman enlisted lasers to bring matter as close to absolute zero as anyone is likely to get—a temperature so low that atoms freeze together into quantum-mechanical clouds predicted by Einstein but never before observed. “That was challenging,” Wieman says. “But changing how people teach, that’s really hard.”

    Wieman should know. Aside from having captained his share of undergraduate physics-for-poets courses, Wieman is now, in a sense, America’s First Science Teacher, in that President Obama took him on last year with the assignment of improving science education in America.

    It’s no secret we’ve got some work to do along those lines. A widely accepted standardized test administered in 2009 to large samplings of high school students in industrialized countries found that U.S. students scored 23rd in science, with students from China scoring highest...

    
    

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Syndicated from Ldonline.org.

Ldonline.org

1. Schools Must Do More to Involve Parents, Students in IEP Process
   February 2, 2012, 2:00 pm
   - Parents and students with disabilities aren't as involved in the process of mapping out their goals with schools as much as they should be, although federal law intends for parents and school staff to work together on these plans, a new study finds.
2. Help Your ADHD Child Click with Cliques
   February 2, 2012, 2:00 pm
   - Help your ADHD child connect with peers and develop a strong social circle with these four strategies for building lasting friendships.
3. Workshops Help Prepare Students with Learning Disabilities for College
   February 2, 2012, 2:00 pm
   - Something changes when students with disabilities make the transition from high school to college. The burden of education shifts from school to student. That point was made clear for about 500 college-bound seniors with learning disabilities, as the Clark County School District's Student Support Services Division hosted three days of workshops at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, for students from every high school.
4. Brain Scans Spot Early Signs of Dyslexia
   January 26, 2012, 2:00 pm
   - Instead of waiting for a child to experience reading delays, scientists now say they can identify the reading problem even before children start school, long before they become labeled as poor students and begin to lose confidence in themselves.
5. Special Educators Borrow from Brain Studies
   January 26, 2012, 2:00 pm
   - While some educators remain skeptical, brain research is slowly migrating from the lab into the classroom, both in predicting which students may have learning difficulties and intervening to help students diagnosed with disabilities.
6. Apps for Children with Dyslexia
   January 26, 2012, 2:00 pm
   - The parent of a second grader newly diagnosed with dyslexia wrote me asking if I knew of any apps that might help her son with reading and math. She'd searched and come up with nothing — and so did I, with the same result. I asked Warren Buckleitner, who reviews children's technology for The Times's Gadgetwise blog, what he'd recommend.
7. Piece of My Heart: Letting My ADHD Son Make His Own Mistakes
   January 26, 2012, 2:00 pm
   - "What's wrong with you?!" I yell at my 23-year-old ADHD son after a thoughtless incident with a tattoo gun. Then I remember myself at that age... and hope I can survive growing up all over again.
8. NIH Announces Funding For New Learning Disabilities Research Centers
   January 19, 2012, 2:00 pm
   - Funding for four centers to conduct research on the causes and treatment of learning disabilities in children and adolescents has been provided by the National Institutes of Health.
9. ADHD and Food: The Connection Is Tenuous
   January 19, 2012, 2:00 pm
   - "The Diet Factor in Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder," the much-cited study released by the journal Pediatrics this week, did not make much of a case for using dietary change to treat Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). But it did make an interesting case for using food control to treat parents' angst about their kids' ADHD.
10. ADHD Med Shortage Puts Squeeze on Parents
    January 19, 2012, 2:00 pm
    - Jason Greene can easily predict which customers ask for Ritalin or Adderall. Their faces are new to him, but their anxious looks have become familiar. "The parents do get a little rattled sometimes when they are trying to help their children," said Greene, a pharmacist at Reeves-Sain Drug Store in Murfreesboro. The independent pharmacy has picked up new customers due to a shortage of ADHD medicines that has parents scurrying from drug store to drug store as if competing in a poker run.

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Syndicated from Science Daily Mine & Brain News.

Science Daily Mind & Brain

1. Gaining insight into a gene's protective role in Parkinson's
   February 8, 2012, 1:23 am
   - Researchers have identified how a specific gene protects dopamine-producing neurons from dying in both animal models and in cultures of human neurons.
2. New diet: Top off breakfast with -- chocolate cake?
   February 7, 2012, 6:37 pm
   - In a study of nearly 200 clinically obese, non-diabetic adults, a researcher found that a 600-calorie breakfast that includes dessert as well as proteins and carbohydrates can help dieters lose weight and keep it off over the long term. Her research indicates that such a morning meal staves off cravings and defuses psychological addictions to sweet foods.
3. New study shows Facebook use elevates mood
   February 7, 2012, 6:34 pm
   - People visit social networking sites such as Facebook for many reasons, including the positive emotional experience that people enjoy and want to repeat, according to a new article.
4. As Valentine's day approaches, cardiologist describes broken heart syndrome
   February 7, 2012, 5:19 pm
   - People who have been unlucky in love are said to suffer from a "broken heart." A broken heart is an actual medical condition. Broken heart syndrome occurs during highly stressful or emotional times, such as a painful breakup, the death of a spouse or the loss of a job.
5. Study of live human neurons reveals Parkinson's origins
   February 7, 2012, 5:18 pm
   - Parkinson’s disease researchers have discovered how mutations in the parkin gene cause the disease, which afflicts at least 500,000 Americans and for which there is no cure.
6. The dark path to antisocial personality disorder
   February 7, 2012, 3:00 pm
   - With no lab tests to guide the clinician, psychiatric diagnostics is challenging and controversial. Antisocial personality disorder is defined as "a pervasive pattern of disregard for, and violation of, the rights of others that begins in childhood or early adolescence and continues into adulthood," according to a standard definition. But, until now, no one has studied the dimensional structure associated with the DSM antisocial personality disorder criteria.
7. Why the middle finger has such a slow connection
   February 7, 2012, 3:00 pm
   - Each part of the body has its own nerve cell area in the brain -- we therefore have a map of our bodies in our heads. The functional significance of these maps is largely unclear. What effects they can have is now shown by neuroscientists through reaction time measurements combined with learning experiments and "computational modeling." They have been able to demonstrate that inhibitory influences of neighboring "finger nerve cells" affect the reaction time of a finger.
8. Super dog: Bud Light’s rescue dog ‘Weego’ fetches Cocky Award
   February 7, 2012, 2:56 pm
   - Students in the nation's oldest and maybe still the only course on Super Bowl Advertising rated the big game's commercials in the 9th annual Super Ad Poll.
9. Young love really can hurt: Parents can use Valentine's month to teach safe dating for teens
   February 7, 2012, 2:55 pm
   - There’s a dark side to puppy love. Teen dating: it’s a subject that causes many parents to shudder and shy away, but parents can use Valentine’s Day to start important conversations with their teens or pre-teens. There are ways to make dating and relationships safer for them – not just now but throughout their lives.
10. Who Will Benefit From Stroke Drug? New Score Can Help Decide
    February 6, 2012, 10:42 pm
    - A new scoring method can help doctors quickly decide which stroke patients will respond well to the clot-busting drug alteplase, according to a new study.

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Syndicated from Brain Line -TBI News Around the World.

Brain Line – TBI News Around the World

1. Player Safety of 2012: Progress But Still Work to Do
   February 7, 2012, 5:00 am
   - Super Bowls have turned on a John Riggins run, a Joe Montana pass and a Santonio Holmes catch. In this era of heightened NFL efforts to protect the brain on game day and for life, what if a Super Bowl hinged on a penalty for roughing the passer or hitting a "defenseless" receiver? For Super Bowl XLVI, New England Patriots linebacker Brandon Spikes said it was his job to play "within the rules" against the New York Giants— whether he like those rules or not. "I just do business as business," Spikes said. "I don't like it as a defensive player. … It's a violent sport. … It's like gladiators out here. … Now, it's changing. But like I say, I do business as business."
2. Study: Child Abuse Bigger Threat than SIDS
   February 7, 2012, 5:00 am
   - Nearly 4,600 U.S. children were hospitalized with broken bones, traumatic brain injury and other serious damage caused by physical abuse in 2006, according to a new report. Babies younger than one were the most common victims, with 58 cases per 100,000 infants. That makes serious abuse a bigger threat to infant safety than SIDS, or sudden infant death syndrome, researchers say in the report. "There is a national campaign to prevent SIDS," said Dr. John Leventhal of Yale University, who led the new study. "We need a national campaign related to child abuse where every parent is reminded that kids can get injured."
3. Brain Injury Rate 7 Times Greater among U.S. Prisoners
   February 6, 2012, 5:00 am
   - Prisoners suffer disproportionately from past traumatic brain injuries. Researchers are hunting for the best tools to treat this population in an effort to help them reintegrate into society—and avoid re-incarceration.
4. Head-Trauma Lawsuits Against NFL Grow into Hundreds
   February 6, 2012, 5:00 am
   - Former Philadelphia Eagles fullback Kevin Turner is one of hundreds of former NFL players and their families currently suing the league for alleged negligence, claiming that it didn't do enough to mitigate the risks despite what many say is an inherently dangerous sport.
5. What It's Like When an NFL Linebacker Nearly Knocks Your Head Off
   February 6, 2012, 5:00 am
   - On a Thursday night in 2008, Willie McGinest nearly decapitated me. I was a tight end for the Broncos; he was a linebacker for the Browns. I was in the slot on the left. He was the strong-side linebacker, or "Sam," on the right. I ran a seam route that took me into the middle of the field versus a two-safety look. He dropped into coverage. Having no receivers in his zone to hold him, he was free to keep his eyes up at anyone who might be coming across the field.
6. Super Bowl 2012: Football Coaches and Players Need to Get Health Issues Through their Heads
   February 3, 2012, 5:00 am
   - Each time BenJarvus Green-Ellis lines up behind Tom Brady in Sunday’s Super Bowl, the Patriots running back will fasten a special chin strap to his helmet, featuring an impact indicator designed to help detect the probability of concussions. During a commercial break, television viewers will be shown a promotional message from the NFL touting the advances the league has made in player safety. Without question, the NFL has made health issues a higher priority in recent years. Commissioner Roger Goodell has earned genuine respect for what he has done to protect players in both the short and long term. Equipment is better. Rules are stricter — and they’re more stringently enforced.
7. Computerized Tests for Concussions May Be Unreliable
   February 3, 2012, 5:00 am
   - Schools worried about concussions increasingly use computerized tests to tell if a student athlete has a brain injury. But new research says those tests aren't reliable enough to diagnose concussion, or to tell if it's safe to return to play. The researchers looked at research on one computerized neuropsychologist test, called ImPACT, that is widely used by colleges and high schools. (Here's one NPR story on how high schools use ImPACT to assess concussions.) It's also used by the National Football League and National Hockey League.
8. 'They Use You Up': Hall of Famer Dorsett Suing NFL
   February 3, 2012, 5:00 am
   - The helmet-to-helmet shot knocked Tony Dorsett out cold in the second quarter of a 1984 Cowboys-Eagles game, the hardest hit he ever took during his Hall of Fame NFL career. "It was like a freight train hitting a Volkswagen," Dorsett says now. "Did they know it was a concussion?" he asks rhetorically during an interview with The Associated Press. "They thought I was half-dead."
9. Insurance Firms, NHL Face Off over Concussions
   February 3, 2012, 5:00 am
   - With the number of concussions growing in the National Hockey League, insurance companies are considering throwing the financial burden back on the league's teams. More than 60 NHL players are sidelined with head injuries this season including Pittsburgh Penguin captain Sidney Crosby. Now insurance companies specializing in sports say that the league's 30 teams will have to absorb the risk of million-dollar contracts alone as the number of players sidelined increases.
10. Mind-Reading Advance Lets Brain Scientists 'Eavesdrop' on Thoughts
    February 2, 2012, 5:00 am
    - Scientists already know how to see into your mind's eye, and now they can hear the voices in your head. In a new paper published in PLoS Biology, researchers present evidence showing that they can track the brain activity of a person listening to spoken words and use it to reconstruct the words. Has Big Brother arrived? Not quite. The University of California, Berkeley scientists behind the study didn't actually read minds. They only "eavesdropped" on words that subjects were actually hearing. But it may not be so hard to apply the research to words we imagine. "There is some evidence that hearing the sound and imagining the sound activate similar areas of the brain," said study co-author Brian N. Pasley, a post-doctoral researcher at the university.

Syndicated from Science Daily Mine & Brain News.

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