Originally used to help patients with brain injuries, tDCS has supposedly been found to increase cognitive performance in healthy adults.
"Alfredo is an outstanding surgeon, and takes very humane and very skilled care of patients with brain tumors, " says Dr. Henry Brem, chairman of the department of neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Medicine.
That science blends psychiatry and neuroscience, supposing, for instance, that patients with brain injuries produce false memories because it's their bodies' involuntary, natural way of healing, and that hormones can cause memory suppression.
Using a database of patients with brain injuries kept by researchers at the University of Iowa, they found five patients in whom the relevant brain areas had been destroyed by stroke or other injuries.
Dr Freeland said he had seen patients with similar brain injuries recover from comas with very little lasting damage.
Dr. Walter Koroshetz, deputy director of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, says that these days doctors will perform scans on patients with prior brain tumors every couple of months to check for early evidence of regrowth.
With vegetative patients the brain injury causes sufficient damage to leave them with nothing but core reflexes and no higher cognitive function.
Furthermore, eugenol inhibits monoamine oxidase A (MAO-A) and may restore monoamines that are decreased in the brain of patients with depression.
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"We cannot emphasise enough that measles is an illness that can kill, or leave patients with permanent complications including severe brain damage, and the only protection is two doses of the MMR vaccination, " she added.
In patients with dementia, the symptoms of brain cells dying, bad sleep and memory loss are far far worse than in normal ageing.
But they also recorded a similar fall in 24% of patients with more mild symptoms of impaired brain function, who might have been in the very earliest stages of Alzheimer's.
The team used a technique called magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) to examine brain function in eight patients with serious lung disease.
Studies have linked gluten exposure in celiac patients with higher incidences of migraines, brain lesions, epilepsy, dementia, and learning disorders.
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Experts said the findings could be important for future research into brain cell repair in patients with neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's disease and, importantly, that studies in mice would be applicable to humans.
Donoghue is working on a project called BrainGate2, where scientists are developing technologies to reconnect the brain to the body in patients with paralysis.
"Even with severe brain injury, some qualities of the human existence are preserved and we should always treat patients with dignity, " Hanley said.
Without getting into a ton of details, it turns out that in some very specific cases, patients specifically with lateral prefrontal damage performed better than people without brain damage.
The MRIs can tell how much brain tissue can be saved, and those patients with irreversible damage don't get the drug.
Further tests showed that DISC1 acts like lithium, a drug commonly prescribed as mood stabiliser to patients with mental illness, inhibiting the action of a key chemical in the brain.
One trial of 113 patients showed 58% had good brain function after three months, compared with 33% of those treated with the coil method, as well as a lower death rate.
In one study in 2004 researchers at the University of Toronto used positron emission tomography scanning to track the brain activity of 14 depressed patients who had successfully been treated with CBT, comparing them with 13 patients who got better by taking only Paxil.
In 2008, following the pilot, Wishard Health Services, affiliated with Indiana University, opened the Healthy Aging Brain Center, where patients can receive a full diagnostic work-up, including neurological exams and brain scans.
Biogen Idec and partner Elan had to pull their multiple sclerosis drug Tysabri after patients in clinical trials came down with a rare viral disorder that can lead to brain damage or death.
Anesthesiologists paralyze patients undergoing sensitive surgeries on the spine, brain or heart by bathing cellular receptors with strong muscle relaxants.
As we understand more about the physical differences between the normal brain and brains with disorders, we may be able to help patients sooner and better, but that may be some years down the road.
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After the holes were drilled, it took a couple of hours to place the bundles of electrodes in an area of the brain called the subthalmic nucleus (STN), which is over stimulated in patients with Parkinson's disease.
For sensitive operations like spine, heart or brain surgery, doctors don't just put patients to sleep, they temporarily paralyze them with powerful muscle relaxants.
As with many such patients, the congresswoman was placed in a medical coma and on a ventilator to allow the brain to recover.
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"In principle, if you can get the NGF into the brain successfully, this could offer a way of slowing down the decline of mental abilities in patients with Alzheimer's disease, " she said.
He argues that the amount of amyloid in patient brains doesn't correlate much with dementia, and blocking tau, a second protein that accumulates in the brain cells of demented patients, as his company is doing is a much better way to go.
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