All Posts: neuroscience
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Children Use Both Brain Hemispheres to Understand Language, Unlike Adults
WASHINGTON (September 7, 2020) — Infants and young children have brains with a superpower, of sorts, say Georgetown University Medical Center neuroscientists. Whereas adults process most discrete neural tasks in specific areas in one or the other of their brain’s two hemispheres, youngsters use both the right and left hemispheres to do the same task. […]
Category: News Release
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Gulf War Illness and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Distinct Illnesses, Georgetown Study Suggests
WASHINGTON (August 10, 2020) — A brain imaging study of veterans with Gulf War illness (GWI) and patients with chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) (sometimes called myalgic encephalomyelitis), has shown that the two illnesses produce distinctly different, abnormal patterns of brain activity after moderate exercise. The result of the Georgetown University Medical Center study suggests that […]
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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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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Brain Studies Show Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and Gulf War Illness are Distinct Conditions
CHICAGO (October 23, 2019) — Gulf War Illness (GWI) and chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) share symptoms of disabling fatigue, pain, systemic hyperalgesia (tenderness), negative emotion, sleep and cognitive dysfunction that are made worse after mild exertion (postexertional malaise). Now, neuroscientists at Georgetown University Medical Center have evidence, derived from human brain studies, that GWI and […]
Category: News Release
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Why, Sometimes, We Don’t See What We Actually Saw
WASHINGTON (October 23, 2019) — Georgetown neuroscientists say they have identified how people can have a “crash in visual processing” — a bottleneck of feedforward and feedback signals that can cause us not to be consciously aware of stimuli that our brain recognized. In the Journal of Vision (DOI 10.1167/19.12.20), investigators describe what can occur […]
Category: News Release
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Novel Agent Flips on ‘Garbage Disposal’ in Neurons, Eliminating Toxic Brain Proteins in Mice
CHICAGO (October 22, 2019) — Neuroscientists at Georgetown University Medical Center say they have developed and tested an agent that reduces the buildup of toxic proteins in animal models of both Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases, and improves cognitive and motor behavior. The team presented their findings about the agent, CM101 (also known as BK40143), in […]
Category: News Release
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Exposure to Environmental PCBs Impairs Brain Function in Mice
CHICAGO (October 22, 2019) — Human-made toxic chemicals that linger indefinitely in the environment disrupt the performance of critical helper cells in the mouse brain, leading to impaired function over long-term exposures, say neuroscientists at Georgetown University Medical Center. Their study, believed to be the first to test polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) in astrocytes — cells […]
Category: News Release
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Finding Upends Theory about the Cerebellum’s Role in Reading and Dyslexia
WASHINGTON (October 9, 2019) — New brain imaging research debunks a controversial theory about dyslexia that can impact how it is sometimes treated, Georgetown University Medical Center neuroscientists say. The cerebellum, a brain structure traditionally considered to be involved in motor function, has been implicated in the reading disability known as developmental dyslexia. However, this […]
Category: News Release