Category Health/Medical

Each year, according to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), millions of people in the U.S. are affected by spinal cord and traumatic brain injuries, along with neuro-developmental and degenerative diseases such as ADHD, autism, cerebral palsy, Alzheimer’s disease, multiple sclerosis, epilepsy and Parkinson’s disease.

Assistant Professor Pabitra Sahoo, of Rutgers University-Newark’s Department of Biological Sciences, has made it his life’s work to understand how our neurological system becomes damaged by these injuries and conditions, and when and how neurons in our central and peripheral nervous systems re...

Researchers at the TechMed Center of the University of Twente and Radboud University Medical Center have removed blood clots with wireless magnetic robots. This innovation promises to transform treatment for life-threatening vascular conditions like thrombosis.

Cardiovascular diseases such as thrombosis are a major global health challenge...

A research team has identified different subtypes of white matter (WM) astrocytes, including a unique type with the ability to multiply and potentially aid in brain repair. Using single-cell RNA sequencing and spatial transcriptomics, the scientists mapped astrocyte diversity across different brain regions and species, providing the first detailed molecular profile of WM astrocytes.

The team was led by Dr. Judith Fischer-Sternjak from Helmholtz Munich and Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU) München, alongside Prof. Magdalena Götz from Helmholtz Munich, LMU and the Munich Cluster for Systems Neurology (SyNergy)...

Researchers used visual threat manipulation in the virtual reality environment and thermal stimulation to investigate how the brain perceives pain. They found that the brain perceives pain more strongly when the perceived pain is out of alignment with reality. In particular, pain was amplified when unexpected events occurred.

Pain perception can vary greatly. Sometimes, we feel pain more intensely than expected due to an injury or physical ailment but may feel less intense pain at other similar instances. This variability indicates that our perception of pain is highly dependent on our expectations and uncertainty.

Two hypotheses have been proposed to explain how the brain perceives pain.

One is the Estimate Hypothesis, where the brain estimat...