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Category: neuroscience – Page 2

10,000 Brain Scans Reveal Why Your Memory Gets Worse With Age

Our episodic memory – the ability to recall past events and experiences – is known to decline as we age. Exactly how and why has remained something of a mystery, and a recent study goes some way towards solving it.

Researchers led by a team from the University of Oslo in Norway wanted to see whether this memory loss affects everyone equally, or if it might be driven by individual risk factors, such as the APOE ε4 gene linked to Alzheimer’s disease.

The scale of their analysis is impressive. The scientists combined data from 3,737 cognitively healthy participants, tracked over several years, including 10,343 MRI scans and 13,460 memory assessments, from multiple long-running studies.

Key to human intelligence lies in how brain networks work together, neuroimaging study suggests

Modern neuroscience understands the brain as a set of specialized systems. Aspects of brain function such as attention, perception, memory, language, and thought have been mapped onto distinct brain networks, and each has been examined largely in isolation.

While this approach has yielded major advances, it has left unresolved one of the most basic facts about human cognition: its overall unity as an integrated system.

Now, researchers at the University of Notre Dame have conducted a neuroimaging study to investigate how the brain is organized and how that integrated system gives rise to intelligence. Their study was published in the journal Nature Communications.

Several Psychiatric Disorders Share The Same Root Cause, Study Suggests

Researchers have discovered that eight different psychiatric conditions share a common genetic basis.

A study published in early 2025 pinpointed specific variants among those shared genes, showing how they behave during brain development.

The US team found many of these variants remain active for extended periods, potentially influencing multiple developmental stages – and offering new targets for treatments that could address several disorders at once.

Scientists grow specialized nerve cells that degenerate in ALS and are damaged in spinal cord injury

Researchers have developed a way to grow a highly specialized subset of brain nerve cells that are involved in motor neuron disease and damaged in spinal injuries. Their study, published today in eLife, presents fundamental findings on the directed differentiation of a rare population of special brain progenitors—also known as adult or parent stem cells—into corticospinal-like neurons. The editors note that the work provides compelling data demonstrating the success of this new approach.

The findings set the stage for further research into whether these molecularly directed neurons can form functional connections in the body, and to explore their potential use in human diseases where corticospinal neurons are compromised.

Ferroplasticity drives social isolation-induced anxiety via a ventral hippocampal iron-α-synuclein axis

Online now: Social isolation is a major risk factor for anxiety disorders. Wang et al. reveal that isolation of mice drives anxiety through an iron-dependent synaptic remodeling mechanism (ferroplasticity) in the ventral hippocampus. Targeting excess brain iron or α-synuclein signaling via non-invasive intranasal delivery rescues anxiety, offering a novel therapeutic strategy.

New study finds heart attacks involve brain and immune system, not just heart

Arteries become clogged. Blood flow is restricted and oxygen is cut off. The result is a heart attack, the world’s leading cause of death.

The conventional approach to studying and treating these episodes is to focus on the heart as an isolated organ. University of California San Diego research, led by the School of Biological Sciences, is upending the way heart attacks are viewed under a transformative new understanding of how cardiac events are interconnected with other systems.

In a study published in the journal Cell, Postdoctoral Scholar Saurabh Yadav, Assistant Professor Vineet Augustine and their colleagues describe a comprehensive new picture of heart attacks and their resulting damage by connecting the heart, the brain and the nervous and immune systems.

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