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Medicine & Health:

Obesity linked to brain shrinkage and dementia

Category: Neuroscience

THE dangers of obesity are very well known. Being overweight is associated with an increased risk of coronary heart disease and stroke, the two leading causes of death in the Western world. Gout is more common in overweight people, with...

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Surgery on conscious patients reveals sequence and timing of language processing

Category: Neuroscience

Using electrodes implanted into the brains of conscious epileptic patients, researchers reveal that Broca's Area processes different types of language information in a well-defined temporal sequence.

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Vegetative and minimally conscious patients can learn

Category: Medicine & Health

A new study shows that patients in the vegetative and minimally conscious can learn simple associations. This behaviour is strongly correlated to later recovery, and may become an important new way of evaluating patients with consciousness disorders.

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Voluntary amputation and extra phantom limbs

Category: Medicine & Health

If someone told you that they wanted to have a perfectly good leg amputated, or that they have three arms, when they clearly do not, you would probably be inclined to think that they are mentally disturbed. Psychiatrists, too, considered...

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The biggest medical breakthrough of the year

Category: Medicine & Health

The top medical breakthrough of the year, according to TIME Magazine, is the creation of motor neurons from ALS patients. (Here are all 50 of the magazine's Top 10 lists for 2008.)This work was carried out by researchers at Harvard...

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Distorting the body image affects perception of pain

Category: Neuroscience

The term body image was coined by the great neurologist Henry Head and refers to a mental representation of one's physical appearance. Constructed by the brain from past experience and present sensations, the body image is a fundamental aspect of...

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Removal of a parasitic worm from the brain

Category: Microbiology

Fox 10 News has a rather gruesome story about the removal of a live parasitic worm from a woman's brain, which is accompanied by a film clip  containing footage of the surgical procedure. As the film explains, the woman,...

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Brain surgery with a banjo

Category: Medicine & Health

The BBC has film footage of the legendary Bluegrass musician Eddie Adcock playing the banjo whilst having his brain operated on.Adcock is suffering from essential tremor, a progressive neurological condition characterised by tremors in the arms which appear during voluntary...

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Knife plunged 5 inches into skull

Category: Medicine & Health

These X-rays show a knife plunged into the skull of a 16-year-old boy from southeast London. Fortunately, his injuries were nowhere near as serious as they might have been - according to a police officer quoted in The Times,...

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Exercise repairs radiotherapy-induced brain damage

Category: Neuroscience

Radiation therapy is a common treatment for adults and children who present with tumours in or close to the brain. In the last 20 years, advances in radiotherapy have significantly improved the prognosis for brain cancer patients. However, the resulting...

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