Medical Breakthrough '08: Seeing Into the Brain

Recent advances in medicine lead to knew understanding of the human brain.

• Your Medical Care
• Breakthroughs
• Mind & Body

• Believe it or not, you make new brain cells all the time. It's called neurogenesis, and for the first time, scientists have watched a living human brain growing these cells. The discovery was made by researchers at Stony Brook University Medical Center, Brookhaven National Laboratory and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory using high-tech magnetic resonance spectroscopy. Watching the process could one day help diagnose and treat disorders like Parkinson's disease, multiple sclerosis and depression, in which neurogenesis is disrupted. Now

• In Germany, researchers have developed a new technique to see the entire neural network of a mouse brain in 3-D for the first time -- without having to slice it apart with a scalpel and reconstruct it on a computer. The method, which uses fluorescent molecules and lasers, may help shed light on how well drugs work against degenerative nerve diseases such as Alzheimer's. It may also provide useful information about how human brains change over time and in response to disease. Now

• With the world's most powerful magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine, doctors may soon be able to tell in days, instead of weeks, how well a cancer treatment is working. The device, called the 9.4 Tesla and developed at the University of Illinois at Chicago, can show whether cells within a brain tumor are dying long before the tumor itself begins to shrink. 3-5 years

From Reader's Digest - March 2008

 

• Medical Breakthroughs for 2008
• New hope for cancer, diabetes, dementia and more.
• 
• Brain Powered
• A wave of recent advances shows how the mind affects health in ways we never imagined.
• 
• Retrain Your Brain
• 20 memory tricks you’ll never forget.
• 
• America's Brain Drain Crisis
• Why our best scientists are disappearing, and what's really at stake.
• 

• Be Inspired
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• Meet 6 Incredible Individuals
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• Quiz: Match the Celebrity With the Cause

We had just received the exciting news that our daughter was pregnant with her first child. So we decided to order a gift from a maternity store near her called Great Expectations. We checked the phone book and located a Great Expectations in our town. But when my wife went to the address, all she found was a storefront office. "Where are the clothes?" she asked the man sitting behind the front desk.

With a very puzzled look on his face, the man responded, "Clothes?"

"Maternity clothes."

"I think you're rushing things," he said. "This is a dating service."

-- Tom Smith