It seems to be a fact of life that memory performance decreases as we age, but new research helps to understand what precisely is decreasing, why and points towards strategies that might help. A study published in the journal Memory suggests that older adults perform less well on working memory tasks as they do not forget information that is no longer relevant [1]. This might sound like a good thing, but it leads to overload of memory processes, damaging memory performance.

Images in the mind image via Shutterstock

A recent study published in the journal Epilepsia indicates that there is a bidirectional relationship between schizophrenia and epilepsy [1]. This means that people with schizophrenia are at a higher risk of developing epilepsy, and those with epilepsy face a higher risk of developing schizophrenia. The fact that each disorder acts as a risk factor for the other indicates that the two may share some underlying causative factors, be they genetic, environmental, or neurological in origin.

Patients at a high risk for a second stroke who received intensive medical treatment had fewer strokes and deaths than patients who received a brain stent in addition to the medical treatment, a large nationwide clinical trial has shown. The investigators published the results in the online first edition of the New England Journal of Medicine [1]. The National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), part of the National Institutes of Health, funded the trial. The medical regimen included daily blood-thinning medications and aggressive control of blood pressure and cholesterol.

New enrollment in the study was stopped in April because early data showed significantly more strokes and deaths occurred among the stented patients at the 30-day mark compared to the group who received the medical management alone.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has partnered with the Department of Defense (DoD) to build a central database on traumatic brain injuries. Funded at $10 million over four years, the Federal Interagency Traumatic Brain Injury Research (FITBIR) database is designed to accelerate comparative effectiveness research on brain injury treatment and diagnosis. It will serve as a central repository for new data, link to current databases and allow valid comparison of results across studies.

By isolating cells from patients’ spinal tissue within a few days after death, researchers funded by the National Institutes of Health have developed a new model of the paralyzing disease amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). They found that during the disease, cells called astrocytes become toxic to nerve cells — a result previously found in animal models but not in humans. The new model could be used to investigate many more questions about ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease.