The ability to sense imminent danger and avoid pain is one of the oldest and most important survival strategies in man. Researchers have previously identified a part of the brain which responds to pain - something they believe allows us to predict imminent harm and respond to danger defensively.

Researchers from the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at University College London say that the region of the brain that responds to pain and fear, called the striatum, is also involved in predicting and responding to financial losses. They studied 20 subjects with fMRI while they played a gambling game to win money. Subjects accurately learned to predict when there was a chance of winning or losing money and this learning took place in the striatum.

“This provides a sort of biological justification for the popular concept of ‘financial pain’,” says Dr Ben Seymour, lead author of the study.

Why losing money may be more painful than you think

A five-year study of the brains of 136 subjects showed that changes in the brain precede symptoms and diagnosis of cognitive impairment and Alzheimers.

The participants, all over the age of 65, ranked as cognitively normal on tests given at the start of the study. Brain scans of the participants were also taken at the start of the study. The participants were followed with neurological and cognitive testing over the study period.

At the end of the study, 23 participants had developed MCI (mild cognitive impairment) and, of those, 9 went on to be diagnosed with Alzheimers.

Researchers discovered that changes in the brain had taken place as much as four years before the subjects had started to show cognitive impairment. The brain scans showed a decrease in grey matter in those participants who went on to develop memory problems while they still tested normal for cognitive function.

Researchers hope that the results of the study will help in identifying people at risk of developing MCI which leads to Alzheimers.

The study is published in the April 17, 2007, issue of Neurology®, the scientific journal of the American Academy of Neurology.

People who exercise are known to do better on memory tests. Now researchers at Columbia University Medical Center have discovered why those who exercise have better memory retention.

Researchers used an MRI technique developed at Columbia to study the brains of people who had just exercised. They were able to identify the growth of new neurons in the dentate gyrus, a region of the brain within the hippocampus.

Exercise targets the dentate gyrus, which underlies normal age-related memory decline that begins around age 30 for most adults. The dentate gyrus is the one area of the brain where new neurons are generated, and exercise improves this process.

“Our next step is to identify the exercise regimen that is most beneficial to improve cognition and reduce normal memory loss, so that physicians may be able to prescribe specific types of exercise to improve memory,” said Scott A. Small, M.D., associate professor of neurology at Columbia University Medical Center and the study’s lead author.

Columbia Study - New Reason to Hit The Gym: Fighting Memory Loss

For some people with disturbed and disrupted sleep patterns who have also suffered a mild traumatic brain injury, the trouble could be a circadian rhythm sleep disorder and not insomnia. According to the Academy of Neurology, sleep disorders can be caused by mild head injuries.

Researchers studied 42 individuals who reported insomnia following a mild traumatic brain injury. After undergoing scans, sleep studies and measurements of temperature and saliva melatonin, the study found that 36% of these patients had a circadian rhythm sleep disorder (CRSD).

Patients coming to sleep clinics due to insomnia have a CRSD rate of only 7 to 10 percent. The findings of the study indicate that misdiagnosis of CRSDs could lead to it being labeled as insomnia and the prescription of sleep medications which do nothing to normalize sleep-wake cycles. Additionally, circadian rhythm sleep disorders may be accompanied by other associated psychological and cognition problems.

The study is published in the April 3 issue of Neurology

The Academy of Neurology