A National Institutes of Health-sponsored study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) showed that lorazepam – a widely used but not yet Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved drug for children – is no more effective than an approved benzodiazepine, diazepam, for treating pediatric status epilepticus.
Calls for integrating ethics explicitly throughout neuroscience research, “Everyone benefits when the emphasis is on integration, not intervention.”
Calling for the integration of ethics across the life of neuroscientific research endeavors, the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues (Bioethics Commission) released volume one of its two-part response to President Obama’s request related to the Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative. The report, Gray Matters: Integrative Approaches for Neuroscience, Ethics, and Society, includes four recommendations for institutions and individuals engaged in neuroscience research including government agencies and other funders.
The study of two rare childhood neurodegenerative diseases leads St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital scientists to a new source of DNA damage that may play a role in a wide range of health problems, including cancer
St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital scientists studying two rare, inherited childhood neurodegenerative disorders have identified a new, possibly common source of DNA damage that may play a role in other neurodegenerative diseases, cancer and aging. The findings appear in the current issue of the scientific journal Nature Neuroscience.
Children with autism experience deficits in a type of immune cell that protects the body from infection.
Children with autism experience deficits in a type of immune cell that protects the body from infection. Called granulocytes, the cells exhibit one-third the capacity to fight infection and protect the body from invasion compared with the same cells in children who are developing normally.
The cells, which circulate in the bloodstream, are less able to deliver crucial infection-fighting oxidative responses to combat invading pathogens because of dysfunction in their tiny energy-generating organelles, the mitochondria.
Old data can be mined to find new genetic associations and gene interactions
The power of genome-wide association studies (GWAS) to detect genetic influences on human disease can be substantially increased using a statistical testing framework reported in the May issue of the journal GENETICS.
Despite the proliferation of GWAS, the associations found so far have largely failed to account for the known effects of genes on complex disease — the problem of “missing heritability.” Standard approaches also struggle to find combinations of multiple genes that affect disease risk in complex ways (known as genetic interactions).