All Posts: mind
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Key Mental Abilities Can Actually Improve During Aging
WASHINGTON (August 19, 2021) — It’s long been believed that advancing age leads to broad declines in our mental abilities. Now, new research from Georgetown University Medical Center offers surprisingly good news by countering this view. The findings, published August 19, 2021, in Nature Human Behavior, show that two key brain functions, which allow us […]
Category: News Release
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Ostroumov Receives Whitehall Grant for Research on Neuropsychiatric Disorders
(March 12, 2021) — Since joining Georgetown’s Department of Pharmacology & Physiology in January 2020, assistant professor Alexey Ostroumov, PhD, has focused on establishing his lab — an especially unique challenge in the midst of a pandemic. “I was lucky to have a great team during the last year that helped me to build the […]
Category: GUMC Stories
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Study of Reaching and Grasping with Hand or Foot Reveals Novel Brain Insights
WASHINGTON (October 26, 2020) — People born without upper limbs who use their feet to reach for an item engage the same area in the brain that people with hands use to reach for something, report Georgetown University Medical Center neuroscientists. The finding, published October 26, 2020, in PNAS, advances the basic science of brain […]
Category: News Release
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Study Suggests Unconscious Learning Underlies Belief in God
WASHINGTON (September 9, 2020) — Individuals who can unconsciously predict complex patterns, an ability called implicit pattern learning, are likely to hold stronger beliefs that there is a god who creates patterns of events in the universe, according to neuroscientists at Georgetown University. Their research, reported in the journal Nature Communications, is the first to […]
Category: News Release
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Early-life Education Improves Memory in Old Age — Especially for Women
WASHINGTON (June 5, 2020) — Education appears to protect older adults, especially women, against memory loss, according to a study by investigators at Georgetown University Medical Center, published in the journal Aging, Neuropsychology, and Cognition. The results suggest that children — especially girls — who attend school for longer will have better memory abilities in […]
Category: News Release
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Nilotinib Appears Safe and Affects Biomarkers in Alzheimer’s Disease Clinical Trial
WASHINGTON (May 29, 2020) — A Georgetown University Medical Center clinical trial investigating the cancer drug nilotinib in people with Alzheimer’s disease finds that it is safe and well-tolerated, and researchers say the drug should be tested in a larger study to further determine its safety and efficacy as a potential disease-modifying strategy. The results […]
Category: News Release
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Georgetown’s José Merino Becomes Editor-In-Chief of the World’s Leading Clinical Neurology Journal
(April 18, 2020) — José G. Merino, MD, MPhil, FAHA, FAAN, professor of neurology at Georgetown University School of Medicine, became interested in medical journals as a medical student; he later gained experience in peer-reviewing journals as a fellow. Now, he will merge his longtime interest and extensive experience as he begins a 10-year term […]
Category: GUMC Stories
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Zooming in on Brain Circuits Allows Researchers to Stop Seizure Activity
WASHINGTON (December 16, 2019) — A team of neuroscientists at Georgetown University Medical Center have found, in animal models, that they can “switch off” epileptic seizures. The findings, published online in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), provide the first evidence that while different types of seizures start in varied areas of the […]
Category: News Release
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Nilotinib Appears Safe in Parkinson’s Trial; Drug Thought to Allow Dopamine Replenishment
WASHINGTON (December 16, 2019) — A clinical trial investigating the repurposed cancer drug nilotinib in people with Parkinson’s disease finds that it is reasonably safe and well tolerated. Researchers also report finding an increase in dopamine, the chemical lost as a result of neuronal destruction, and a decrease in neurotoxic proteins in the brain among […]
Category: News Release
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Maguire-Zeiss Named New Chair of Department of Neuroscience
(August 29, 2019) — Since joining Georgetown’s faculty in 2007, Kathy Maguire-Zeiss, PhD, has taken on many roles. In addition to being a professor of neuroscience, she directs the Interdisciplinary Program in Neuroscience (IPN), the Center for Neural Injury and Recovery, the master’s degree program in integrative neuroscience and the T32 Training Program in Neural […]
Category: GUMC Stories