"Health & Medical News"

Researchers measuring blood flow in the brain found that craving for nicotine among smokers produces activity in specific areas of the brain. The study was billed as the first to show how abstinence produces specific craving-related brain-activation patterns.

Increased activity among abstinent smokers was seen in parts of the brain involved in attention, behavioral control, memory, and reward.

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Users of ecstasy and methamphetamine exhibit signs of brain damage similar to that suffered by victims of traumatic brain injuries, according to researchers at the University of Florida? (UF).

A five-year study found that using these drugs can cause a chemical chain reaction leading to cell death in the brain, memory loss, and other potentially permanent problems.

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Obesity is a national epidemic, yet most medical schools are not equipping their students to address it, nutrition advocates say.

The Assn. of American Medical Colleges would like to see this situation change. In an August report, an expert AAMC panel lays out guidelines on how medical schools can incorporate obesity prevention and treatment into their science courses and clinical clerkships.

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Both the eating disorder anorexia and the club-drug ecstasy appear to involve the same serotonin receptor sites in the brain, according to French researchers.

Reuters reported Oct. 3 that researcher Valerie Compan of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Montpelier found that the disease and the drug both activate the 5-HT4 receptor sites, part of the brain’s reward system and located in the nucleus accumbens.

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A major obstacle in the treatment of infections and other diseases of the brain is the blood-brain barrier, which prevents systemically delivered therapeutic drugs from reaching the brain.

Grantees of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of the National Institutes of Health, have now shown that a short protein (peptide) from the rabies virus can carry a strip of therapeutic material into the brain via intravenous administration. Once delivered to the nerve cells of the brain, the strip, called a small interfering RNA (siRNA), was shown to protect mice from infection caused by the Japanese encephalitis virus (JEV).

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