Tumwater, WA — Preventing sprains and strains on the job is the aim of a new online tool from the Washington State Department of Labor & Industries.

After a brain injury, a person “may experience difficulty performing his or her job safely, or in the same manner,” according to the Brain Injury Association of America. “Some may find they need to find other employment, while others can request adaptions in their workplace to accommodate their new needs.”

Boston — Improved air quality in offices can boost worker focus, response times and overall cognitive ability, researchers from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health claim.

Cutting back on consuming ultraprocessed foods can reduce your risk of a stroke or cognitive issues later in life, according to a recent study out of Massachusetts General Hospital.

Washington — Optimizing the health and performance of workers’ brains is the goal of a new NIOSH initiative.

The formula has effectively relieved brain fog, helped combat daily fatigue and muscle weakness, and with 100% transparent full ingredient labeling, including how much to take.

AIDP, Inc. is pleased to announce the clinical study publication “A Magtein®, Magnesium L-Threonate, Based Formula Improves Brain Cognitive Functions in Healthy Chinese Adults”, in Nutrients on Dec. 8, 2022.

Join the celebration at SupplySide West on October 25th at 3 p.m., where Kyowa Hakko USA will host a special event in its booth #4165. Stop by for cake and a toast as it marks this exciting milestone.

AIDP, Inc. announces a new clinical study published in Cureus Journal for Mangifera indica extract under the brand name Stadice® from Zeus Hygia, Life Sciences, Telangana, India. 

The Brain Omega 3 Bar® features naturally occurring flavonoids and 8g of protein to offer better bioavailability of ingredients to nourish both the brain and body.

The new milk chocolate peanut spread is made from six pure ingredients, including premium nuts, high-grade NZMP whey protein and Nutiani’s specialized phospholipid concentrated WPC.

Created by parents, pediatricians, nutrition scientists and neurologists, Brainiac™ Kids is poised to disrupt the nearly $1.5 Billion a year kids yogurt category by meeting growing consumer demand for healthier yogurt options with important added benefits.

One of the best foods for a baby’s healthy brain development is already in most refrigerators: eggs. In an historic first, the newly released 2020-2025 Dietary Guidelines for Americans include recommendations for birth to 24 months old and specifically recommend eggs as an important first food for infants and toddlers, as well as for pregnant women and lactating moms.

Neuro+ was specifically created to support changing lifestyles as families are introducing solids to young children earlier and the rates of exclusive and extended breastfeeding are down (US Breastfeeding Committee). 

The formula was developed by renowned mycologist Paul Stamets. Known for his advanced research on mushroom mycelium and psilocybin, Stamets's contributions in the world of mycology have led to new ways of harnessing the power of fungi to support the health of both people and planet.

The post Ultrasound Neuromodulation of the Brain for Alcohol Use Disorder was curated by information for practice.

The post Study Brain Mechanisms of Frustration With Magnetoencephalography in Healthy Volunteers was curated by information for practice.

The post CfP: Global diversity and disparity in mental health and brain health (Deadline: 1 April) was curated by information for practice.

Last Thanksgiving, Eliana Szabo suffered a brain hemorrhage when an arteriovenous malformation ruptured. Now 11, she has relearned how to walk and talk. Meanwhile, a fellow pianist is trying to raise $10,000 through selling handmade paper cranes.

The new coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, which causes atypical pneumonia COVID-19, can also penetrate into the brain, disrupt the work of the nervous system and cause other severe complications. The disease may not be limited to respiratory infections only. As practical studies show, in a significant number of patients, the virus affects the nervous system. The mechanism of its impact on nerve cells has not been studied yet, but scientists believe that there is some connection: a temporary loss of taste or smell was recognized as specific symptoms of COVID-19 in the middle of March. To make matters worse, the virus may penetrate directly into the brain from the nasopharynx. In this case, the virus may trigger a series of complications, disrupting the normal functioning of almost any organ. The list of possible concomitant diseases is extensive:

In the last few years, we’ve seen increasing awareness of the lasting consequences of serious brain injuries, in part due to high-profile cases connected to the NFL. For those who have recently suffered a brain injury, though, it can be hard to think about what the future will hold, even though planning for long-term care needs is an important step.  In particular, if you’re currently involved in a legal case seeking to recover damages after incurring a brain injury, it’s vital that your legal team consult appropriate medical professionals to ensure the calculation of damages will cover your future care needs. Current Injury Future Risk Traumatic brain injuries (TBIs) vary widely in severity and can result in many different symptoms. Among the most common symptoms of TBI, however, are headaches and dizziness, memory loss, lack of concentration, and agitation and other personality changes. Symptoms of TBI may be temporary, lasting for weeks or months after the initial injury, or may result in permanent impairment, which is why it’s so important to work with a lawyer well-versed in TBI cases.

Designated Doctor Case-Based Webinar Series: Module 6 - Non – Musculoskeletal Traumatic Brain Injury

Challenge yourself with some of the hardest riddles we could find so you can keep your mind sharp! As you tackle these tricky brain teasers, you'll engage your mind in a way that few other activities can.

Using a 5 µm-diameter X-ray beam, we collected scanning X-ray microdiffraction in both the small-angle (SAXS) and the wide-angle (WAXS) regimes from thin sections of fixed human brain tissue from Alzheimer's subjects. The intensity of scattering in the SAXS regime of these patterns exhibits essentially no correlation with the observed intensity in the WAXS regime, indicating that the structures responsible for these two portions of the diffraction patterns, which reflect different length scales, are distinct. SAXS scattering exhibits a power-law behavior in which the log of intensity decreases linearly with the log of the scattering angle. The slope of the log–log curve is roughly proportional to the intensity in the SAXS regime and, surprisingly, inversely proportional to the intensity in the WAXS regime. We interpret these observations as being due to the presence of sub-micrometre-sized voids formed during dehydration of the fixed tissue. The SAXS intensity is due largely to scattering from these voids, while the WAXS intensity derives from the secondary structures of macromolecular material surrounding the voids. The ability to detect and map the presence of voids within thin sections of fixed tissue has the potential to provide novel information on the degradation of human brain tissue in neurodegenerative diseases.

Reconstructions from the Daynès Studio in Paris depict a male Neanderthal (right) face to face with a human, Homo sapiens.; Credit: /Science Source

It's something that many of us reckon with: the sense that we're not quite as sharp as we once were.

I recently turned 42. Having lost my grandfather to Alzheimer's, and with my mom suffering from a similar neurodegenerative disease, I'm very aware of what pathologies might lurk beneath my cranium.

In the absence of a cure for Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia, the most important interventions for upholding brain function are preventive — those that help maintain our most marvelous, mysterious organ.

Based on the science, I take fish oil and broil salmon. I exercise. I try to challenge my cortex to the unfamiliar.

As I wrote my recent book, A History of the Human Brain, which recounts the evolutionary tale of how our brain got here, I began to realize that so many of the same influences that shaped our brain evolution in the first place reflect the very measures we use to preserve our cognitive function today.

Being social, and highly communicative. Exploring creative pursuits. Eating a varied, omnivorous diet low in processed foods. Being physically active.

These traits and behaviors help retrace our past, and, I believe, were instrumental in why we remain on the planet today.

And they all were, at least in part, enabled by our brain.

Social smart alecks finish first

The human saga is riddled with extinctions.

By "human," I don't just mean Homo sapiens, the species we belong to, but any member of the genus Homo. We've gotten used to being the only human species on Earth, but in our not so distant past — probably a few hundred thousand years ago – there were at least nine of us running around.

There was Homo habilis, or the "handy man." And Homo erectus, the first "pitcher." The Denisovans roamed Asia, while the more well-known Neanderthals spread throughout Europe.

But with the exception of Homo sapiens, they're all gone. And there's a good chance it was our fault.

Humans were never the fastest lot on the African plains, and far from the strongest. Cheetahs, leopards and lions held those distinctions. In our lineage, natural selection instead favored wits and wiliness.

Plenty of us became cat food, but those with a slight cognitive edge — especially Homo sapiens — lived on. In our ilk, smarts overcame strength and speed in enabling survival.

Ecology, climate, location and just sheer luck would've played important roles in who persisted or perished as well, as they do for most living beings. But the evolutionary pressure for more complex mental abilities would lead to a massive expansion in our brain's size and neurocircuitry that is surely the paramount reason we dominate the planet like no other species ever has.

Much of this "success," if you can call it that, was due to our social lives.

Primates are communal creatures. Our close monkey and ape cousins are incredibly interactive, grooming each other for hours a day to maintain bonds and relationships. Throw in a few hoots and hollers and you have a pretty complex community of communicating simians.

An active social life is now a known preserver of brain function.

Research shows that social isolation worsens cognitive decline (not to mention mental health, as many of us experienced this past year). Larger social networks and regular social activities are associated with mental preservation and slowed dementia progression.

Entwined in this new social life was an evolutionary pressure that favored innovation. Our eventual ability to generate completely novel thoughts and ideas, and to share those ideas, came to define our genus.

As we hunted and foraged together, and honed stones into hand axes, there was a collective creativity at work that gave us better weapons and tools that enabled more effective food sourcing, and, later, butchering and fire. Effectively sharing these innovations with our peers allowed information to spread faster than ever before - a seed for the larger communities and civilizations to come.

Challenging ourselves to new pursuits and mastering new skills can not only impress peers and ingratiate us to our group, but literally help preserve our brain. New hobbies. New conversations. Learning the banjo. Even playing certain video games and simply driving a new route home from work each day, as neuroscientist David Eagleman does, can keep our function high.

Whether it's honing ancient stone or taking up Sudoku, any pursuit novel and mentally challenging may help keep the neural circuits firing.

We really are what we eat

All the while, as we hunted and crafted in new and communal ways, we had to eat. And we did so with an uniquely adventurous palette.

Homo sapiens is among the most omnivorous species on the planet. Within reason we eat just about anything. Whether it's leaves, meat, fungus, or fruit, we don't discriminate. At some point, one of us even thought it might be a good idea to try the glistening, grey blobs that are oysters - and shellfish are, it turns out, among the healthiest foods for our brain.

The varied human diet is an integral part of our story. As was the near constant physicality required to source it.

On multiple occasions over the past 1 to 2 million years climate changes dried out the African landscape, forcing our ancestors out of the lush forest onto the dangerous, wide-open grasslands. As evolution pressured us to create and commune to help us survive, a diverse diet also supported our eventual global takeover.

Our arboreal past left us forever craving the dangling fruits of the forest, a supreme source of high-calorie sugars that ensured survival. Back then we didn't live long enough to suffer from Type 2 diabetes: if you encountered sweets, you ate them. And today we're stuck with a taste for cookies and candy that, given our longer lifespans, can take its toll on the body and brain.

But humans were just as amenable to dining on the bulbs, rhizomes and tubers of the savanna, especially once fire came along. We eventually became adept scavengers of meat and marrow, the spoils left behind by the big cats, who preferred more nutritive organ meat.

As our whittling improved we developed spears, and learned to trap and hunt the beasts of the plains ourselves. There is also evidence that we learned to access shellfish beds along the African coast and incorporate brain-healthy seafood into our diet.

Studying the health effects of the modern diet is tricky. Dietary studies are notoriously dubious, and often involve countless lifestyle variables that are hard to untangle.

Take blueberries. Multiple studies have linked their consumption with improved brain health. But, presumably, the berry-prone among us are also more likely to eat healthy all around, exercise, and make it to level 5 on their meditation app.

Which is why so many researchers, nutritionists, and nutritional psychiatrists now focus on dietary patterns, like those akin to Mediterranean culinary customs, rather than specific ingredients. Adhering to a Mediterranean diet is linked with preserved cognition; and multiple randomized-controlled trials suggest doing so can lower depression risk.

A similar diversity in our ancestral diet helped early humans endure an ever-shifting climate and times of scarcity. We evolved to subsist and thrive on a wide range of foods, in part because our clever brains allowed us access to them. In turn, a similarly-varied diet (minus submitting to our innate sugar craving of course) is among the best strategies to maintain brain health.

All of our hunting, and foraging, and running away from predators would have required intense physical exertion. This was certainly not unique to humans, but we can't ignore the fact that regular exercise is another effective means of preserving brain health.

Being active improves performance on mental tasks, and may help us better form memories. Long before the Peletons sold out, our brains relied on both mental and physical activity.

But overwhelmingly the evidence points to embracing a collection of lifestyle factors to keep our brain healthy, none of which existed in a Darwinian vacuum.

Finding food was as social an endeavor as it was mental and physical. Our creative brains harnessed information; gossiping, innovating, and cooking our spoils around the campfire.

Researchers are beginning to piece together the complex pathology behind the inevitable decline of the human brain, and despite a parade of failed clinical trials in dementia, there should be promising treatments ahead.

Until then, in thinking about preserving the conscious experience of our world and relationships — and living our longest, happiest lives — look to our past.

Bret Stetka is a writer based in New York and an editorial director at Medscape. His work has appeared in Wired, Scientific American, and on The Atlantic.com. His new book, A History of the Human Brain, is out from Timber/Workman Press. He's also on Twitter: @BretStetka.

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

Young adults ages 18-26 should be viewed as a separate subpopulation in policy and research, because they are in a critical period of development when successes or failures could strongly affect the trajectories of their lives, says a new report from the Institute of Medicine and National Research Council.

Today the science academies of the G7 countries and seven additional academies issued three joint statements to their respective governments to inform discussions during the G7 summit to be held in May in Japan, as well as ongoing policymaking.

The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) should expand the requirement in its disability compensation process regarding who can diagnose traumatic brain injury (TBI) to include any health care professional with pertinent and ongoing brain injury training and experience, says a new congressionally mandated report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

New models for studying the human brain — human neural organoids, transplants, and chimeras — show promise for advancing understanding of the brain and laying the groundwork for new therapeutic approaches to brain diseases that have so far proved hard to treat, says a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

As vaccination campaigns begin ramping up around the world, experts discuss how variants, misinformation, and “brain drain” are affecting pandemic-control efforts.

Every year, nearly 5 million Americans are evaluated for traumatic brain injury (TBI). But many individuals and their caregivers don’t get needed follow-up support after initial injury. A new report recommends structural changes to improve TBI research and care over the next decade.

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