esearchers at Wake Forest University School of Medicine have shown that the effects of sleep deprivation on cognitive performance can be reversed when the naturally occurring brain peptide, orexin-A, is administered in monkeys.”These findings are significant because of their potential applicability,” said Samuel A. Deadwyler, Ph.D., professor of physiology and pharmacology at Wake Forest. “This could benefit patients suffering from narcolepsy and other serious sleep disorders. But it also has applicability to shift workers, the military and many other occupations where sleep is often limited, yet cognitive demand remains high.” Orexin-A, also known as hypocretin-1, is a naturally occurring peptide produced in the brain that regulates sleep. It’s secreted by a small number of neurons but affects many brain regions during the day and people who have normal amounts of orexin-A are able to maintain wakefulness. When people or animals … Read more

High blood pressure appears to be associated with an increased risk for mild cognitive impairment, a condition that involves difficulties with thinking and learning, according to a report in the December issue of Archives of Neurology, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.”Mild cognitive impairment has attracted increasing interest during the past years, particularly as a means of identifying the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease as a target for treatment and prevention,” the authors write as background information in the article. About 9.9 of every 1,000 elderly individuals without dementia develop mild cognitive impairment yearly. Of those, 10 percent to 12 percent progress to Alzheimer’s disease each year, compared with 1 percent to 2 percent of the general population. Christiane Reitz, M.D., Ph.D., and colleagues at the Columbia University Medical Center, New York, followed 918 Medicare recipients age 65 and older (average … Read more

The human mind is a prolific generator of beliefs about the world. The capacity of our minds to believe or disbelieve linguistic propositions is a powerful force for controlling both behavior and emotion, but the basis of this process in the brain is not yet understood.Sam Harris, a UCLA graduate student in the lab of Mark Cohen, a professor of psychiatry at the UCLA Center for Cognitive Neuroscience and a study co-author, and Sameer Sheth of Massachusetts General Hospital, report that functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) reveals clear differences in the areas of the brain involved in belief, disbelief and uncertainty. Their results suggest that the differences among these cognitive states may one day be distinguished reliably, in real time, by techniques of neuroimaging. This finding has implications for the detection of deception, for the control of the placebo effect … Read more

Patients over the age of 60 who have elective surgeries such as joint replacements, hysterectomies and other non-emergency, inpatient procedures, are at an increased risk for long-term cognitive problems, according to a new study led by Duke University Medical Center researchers.The study also found that elderly patients who developed these postoperative cognitive problems were more likely to die in the first year after surgery. “We have known that patients undergoing heart surgery are at risk for cognitive dysfunction — problems with memory, concentration, processing of information — but the effects of non-cardiac surgeries on brain function are not as well-understood,” said Terri Monk, M.D., an anesthesiologist at Duke and the Durham Veterans Affairs Medical Center, and lead investigator on the study. “Our study found that increasing age put patients in this population at greater risk for cognitive problems and this … Read more

Novel treatment strategies for major depression with broader treatment success or a more rapid onset of action would have immense impact on public health, a new study published in the December 1st issue of Biological Psychiatry explains. This new study reports findings that support the evaluation of a potential new antidepressant agent.According to the lead author on this study, Kamilla Miskowiak, MSc: “Although depression is often related to problems in the chemistry of the brain, recent evidence also suggests that there may be structural problems as well with nerve cells not being regenerated as fast as normal or suffering from toxic effects of stress and stress hormones.” This led the researchers to evaluate the effects of erythropoietin (Epo), a hormone naturally produced by the kidneys that stimulates the formation of red blood cells and is known as a treatment for … Read more