Category Health/Medical

In a series of recently published studies using animals and people, Johns Hopkins Medicine researchers say they have further characterized a set of chemical imbalances in the brains of people with schizophrenia related to the chemical glutamate. And they figured out how to tweak the level using a compound derived from broccoli sprouts.

They say the results advance the hope that supplementing with broccoli sprout extract, which contains high levels of the chemical sulforaphane, may someday provide a way to lower the doses of traditional antipsychotic medicines needed to manage schizophrenia symptoms, thus reducing unwanted side effects of the medicines.

“It’s possible that future studies could show sulforaphane to ...

Scientists have succeeded in developing a piece of hardware which could pave the way for creating computers resembling the human brain. They produced a chip containing a network of artificial neurons that works with light and can imitate neurons and their synapses. This network is able to ‘learn’ information and use this as a basis for computing. The approach could be used later in many different fields for evaluating patterns in large quantities of data.

The researchers were able to demonstrate, that such an optical neurosynaptic network...

A newly confirmed link with insulin resistance may radically change the way fibromyalgia and related forms of chronic pain are identified and managed. Researchers led by a team from The University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston were able to dramatically reduce the pain of fibromyalgia patients with medication that targeted insulin resistance.

This discovery could dramatically alter the way that chronic pain can be identified and managed. Dr. Miguel Pappolla, UTMB professor of neurology, said that although the discovery is very preliminary, it may lead to a revolutionary shift on how fibromyalgia and related forms of chronic pain are treated...

Researchers discover certain skin-related stem cells could help in treating neurogenerative diseases. Neurodegenerative diseases like multiple sclerosis (MS) affect millions of people worldwide and occur when parts of the nervous system lose function over time...