Recent events such as the ten-year commemoration of September 11th just weeks ago, Hurricane Irene striking the east coast this past summer, three months of oil spills off of the Gulf Coast a year ago, and the tragic earthquakes that struck Chile and Haiti in early 2010, are constant reminders that tragedy and catastrophe can occur at any moment...

Treating U.S. veterans with mental illness and substance use disorders is more expensive than caring for veterans with other medical conditions, costing more than $12 billion in 2007, according to a new RAND Corporation study...

Treating U.S. veterans with mental illness and substance use disorders is more expensive than caring for veterans with other medical conditions, costing more than $12 billion in 2007, according to a new RAND Corporation study...

Two Washington and Lee University economists leading a group of researchers have found that individuals who have suffered from long-term unemployment in the past year those unemployed for longer than 25 weeks are three times more likely than people employed throughout the past year to experience mental-health issues for the first time...

IQ, the standard measure of intelligence, can increase or fall significantly during our teenage years, according to research funded by the Wellcome Trust, and these changes are associated with changes to the structure of our brains. The findings may have implications for testing and streaming of children during their school years...

ROCKVILLE, Md.--A new experiment aimed at achieving actor Christopher Reeve's dream of finding an effective treatment for spinal paralysis was announced this week at an international meeting of scientists and people with spinal cord injury sponsored by the United 2 Fight Paralysis Foundation. The approach, which already is shown to be promising in animals and avoids the need for patients to take immunosuppressive drugs, has not yet been proved effective in humans. Nonetheless, patients are excited to see this advance as they have been frustrated waiting for the first human trials of the new approach.

W. Dalton Dietrich, scientific director of The Miami Project to Cure Paralysis at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, announced here that his research team has submitted an application to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for permission to begin new "phase I" experiments on humans to treat paralysis using the new cell transplantation technique. (Phase I trials have nothing to do with efficacy. They are only to test safety and typically a nontherapeutic dose is used at the outset of the safety studies.) With the new technique, rather than using cells derived from embryonic stem cells , the patient's own mature cells are harvested from a nerve in the leg and grown in large numbers in the laboratory, then transplanted back into the injured spinal cord to repair damage. This approach avoids the problems of immunological rejection and the controversy that can arise from using cells derived from embryonic stem cells for treating neurological injury and disease. Typically, patients receiving an organ or tissue transplant from a donor must be given immunosupressant drugs to prevent their immune systems from attacking the foreign tissue. 

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Dr. Sandro Galea, a National Institute of Mental Health grantee, talks about disasters and mental health research.

Dr. Sandro Galea, a National Institute of Mental Health grantee, talks about disasters and mental health research.

New Guidelines from the American Academy of Pediatrics say that children as young as four can be diagnoses and treated for ADHD. The previous research was more than a decade old and covered children from 6 to 12, but with more research and understanding of the issues surrounding ADHD in children, the upper limit was also expanded to include teenagers to age 18. Dr...

Carriers of the so-called KIBRA T allele have better memories than those who don't have this gene variant. This means we can reject the theory that the brain of a non-bearer compensates for this. This is shown by researchers from Umea University in The Journal of Neuroscience. In this study, KIBRA was first examined in relation to the memory performance of a group of 2,230 subjects...