Quick medical intervention is critical to a person experiencing a prolonged convulsive seizure. With every passing minute, the seizure becomes harder to stop, and can place the patient at risk of brain damage and death. This is why paramedics are trained to administer anticonvulsive medications, often intravenously, as soon as possible, before arriving at the hospital.

A major clinical trial now shows that an even faster method, which involves injecting drugs into the thigh muscle using an autoinjector (similar to a pre-loaded syringe), is just as safe and more effective. For more information, click here to read the full release.

Basic examinations of walking speed and hand-grip strength may help doctors determine how likely a middle-aged person is to develop dementia or have a stroke, according to new research to be presented at the American Academy of Neurology’s 64th Annual Meeting in New Orleans, April 21-28, 2012.

“These are basic office tests which can provide insight into risk of dementia and stroke, and can be easily performed by a neurologist or general practitioner,” says Erica C. Camargo, MD, MSc, PhD, of Boston Medical Center. For more information, click here to read the full release.

Cognitive loss and brain degeneration affect millions of adults, and that number is set to increase due to the large population of aging baby boomers. Today, nearly 20 percent of people age 65 or older suffer from mild cognitive impairment, and 10 percent of adults in the same age group have dementia.

Scientists at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), previously developed a brain-imaging tool to help assess the neurological changes associated with these conditions. The UCLA team now reports that the brain-scan technique effectively tracked and predicted cognitive decline over a two-year period, as detailed in the February issue of the journal Archives of Neurology. For more information, click here to read the full release.

Through the use of complex machine learning techniques to decipher repeated advanced brain scans, researchers at New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell have been able to show that a patient with a severe brain injury could, in his or her own way, communicate accurately.

The study, which appears in the Feb. 13 issue of the Archives of Neurology, demonstrates how hard it is to determine whether a patient can communicate using only measured brain activity, even if it is possible for them to generate reliable patterns of brain activation in response to instructed commands. Researchers say that a patient in a minimally conscious state or who has locked-in syndrome (normal cognitive function with severe motor impairment) and can follow commands in the absence of a motor response may not generate clearly interpretable communications using the same patterns of brain activity. For more information, click here to read the full release.

Different people react differently to pain. Some can’t even bear to have clothes touch their skin. For others, every step is a deliberate and agonizing choice. Whether pain is caused by arthritic joints, a nerve injury or a disease like fibromyalgia, research now suggests there are new solutions chronic pain sufferers.

A team of researchers led by McGill neuroscientist Terence Coderre, an affiliate of the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre in Quebec, Canada, has found the key to understanding how memories of pain are stored in the brain. The researchers also are able to suggest how these memories can be erased as a means of easing chronic pain. For more information, click here to read the full release.

The public can register for free (including the entire family) to attend the Brain Health Fair on Saturday, April 21, 2012, from 9:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. at the New Orleans Ernest N. Morial Convention Center. Free registration now is open at www.BrainHealthFair.com. Those who register in advance will receive a free giveaway at the door. For more information, click here to read the full release.

The peer-reviewed Spine journal now is available in a new mobile edition designed for the iPad.

“The orthopedists, neurosurgeons, and other professionals who read our journal are challenged to keep up with all the new research and information they need to provide top-quality care for their patients with spinal disorders,” says James N. Weinstein, DO, editor-in-chief of Spine. “Spine for the iPad is designed to help meet that challenge by giving readers full access to current and past issues, whenever and wherever they need it.”

Spine is published by Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, a part of Wolters Kluwer Health. The application was unveiled at the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons’ (AAOS’) Annual Meeting in San Francisco. For more information, click here to read the full release.

The American Society for Radiation Oncology (ASTRO) has developed a new guideline on the radiotherapeutic and surgical management of newly diagnosed brain metastases. It has been published in ASTRO’s official clinical practice journal: Practical Radiation Oncology (PRO).

“This guideline was developed by an international multidisciplinary task force charged with systematically reviewing and synthesizing level one and other high-quality data into a distilled work product,” says Eric L. Chang, MD, a radiation oncologist at the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine, Los Angeles. “It should help clinicians make solid evidence-based decisions, while still allowing best clinical judgment to fill in knowledge gaps not readily addressed by the guideline.” For more information, click here to read the full release.

New research from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) may one day help you improve your memory.

UCLA neuroscientists have shown that they can strengthen memory in human patients by stimulating a critical junction in the brain. The findings could result in a new method of boosting memory in patients with early Alzheimer’s disease. Study results are published in the Feb. 9 edition of the New England Journal of Medicine. For more information, click here to read the full release.

Traditional surgery to repair life-threatening brain aneurysms is highly invasive. It involves opening the skull, retracting the brain and placing a clip to seal off the ruptured aneurysm. Recovery takes months, and patients can suffer cognitive deficits.

However, neurosurgeon William W. Ashley Jr., MD, PhD, of the Loyola University Medical Center, Maywood, Ill., was able to repair patient Carolyn Davis’ aneurysm without cutting into her skull. Instead, he repaired the defect with a catheter threaded through her blood vessels up to her brain. For more information, click here to read the full release.