Mara Dierssen muestra una gran capacidad para divulgar los secretos de un órgano tan desconocido como el cerebro. Domina el escenario. Incluso cuando esta neurobióloga santanderina de 61 años canta con su grupo de pop-rock, From Lost To The River, cumple con la máxima clásica de enseñar deleitando.
Solemos pensar en él como un ente invariable e indiferente a las demás zonas del cuerpo. Pero esta neurocientífica que estudia su interacción con el corazón, el intestino y otros órganos, lo tiene claro: nuestra fábrica de pensar es una infinita caja de sorpresas.
El padre de la neurociencia mundial, el español Santiago Ramón y Cajal, inventaba preciosas metáforas para divulgar lo que él mismo descubría a finales del siglo XIX con su microscopio, en animales o en cadáveres de niños.
The protective sheath surrounding the brain’s blood supply—known as the blood-brain barrier—is a safeguard against nasty germs and toxins. But it also prevents existing drugs that could potentially be used to treat brain cancer or Alzheimer’s disease from reaching the brain. That’s why scientists want to unchain the gates of this barrier. Now a new study shows it’s been done in cancer patients.
The symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury overlap in a dizzying blur of similarity: depression, difficulty concentrating, anxiety, fatigue, loss of interest, and more.
Mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI)—the result of the head being hit or violently shaken—and PTSD plague returning veterans and affect civilians: Each year, an estimated 8 million adults have PTSD and 1.3 million Americans sustain a mild brain injury.
Imagine that, heaven forbid, a blood vessel bursts inside your brain, spilling blood and causing pressure to build inside delicate tissues. You’ve just suffered the deadliest kind of stroke, what’s known as an intracerebral hemorrhage. You might think that surgeons would want to try to repair the damage as soon as you get to the hospital, but cutting into an already bleeding brain could cause even more damage. Instead, you’ll probably get sent to intensive care, where clinicians manage your blood pressure, keep you sedated, and hope for the best.
Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is a growing health concern in many occupations and disciplines. From amateur and professional athletes to soldiers and first responders, more and more people worldwide are at risk of sustaining TBIs and suffering potentially debilitating long-term effects.
TBIs can happen anywhere, from battlefields to sports arenas, at home or on the road. Among both children and adults, falls are the leading cause of these impacts to the head, followed by blunt trauma, car crashes, and assaults.
Psychologists and engineers at Binghamton University in New York have hit a milestone in the quest to use the unassailable inner workings of your brain as a form of biometric identification. They came up with an electroencephalograph system that proved 100 percent accurate at identifying individuals by the way their brains responded to a series of images.
Cerebral adrenoleukodystrophy is a rare, crippling neurological disease that leaves its patients, typically boys, severely disabled and ultimately dead in a matter of years. Only painful, dangerous bone marrow transplants can stop the progression of CALD. But while the transplants are effective in many cases, they can also be deadly for the patients who get them.
