#brain-donation

#brain-donation

Hannah Dyos, diagnosed with autoimmune hepatitis, was transferred to King's College Hospital where she underwent a life-saving liver transplant, expressing gratitude for her donor and the staff.

These findings reposition the thymus as a central regulator of immune‑ mediated aging and disease susceptibility in adulthood.

Coles' brain was preserved with a slurry of 'cryoprotective' chemicals, and despite expectations of damage, the tissue structure survived with relative vigor.

The probability that frozen tissue will benefit the person who froze it is remote. The chance of developing acute lymphoblastic leukemia, the most common childhood cancer, currently stands at one in 20,000.

When Lorraine Kelly Donnelly felt a cramp in her left hand at the start of 2025, she didn't think anything of it. But when a week later the pain was still there, she made an appointment to see her GP.

Artificial intelligence (AI) machine learning is making a difference in assistive technology to help restore movement for the paralyzed. A new study in the American Institute of Physics journal APL Bioengineering shows how AI has the potential to restore lower-limb functions in those with severe spinal cord injuries (SCIs) by identifying patterns in brain signals captured noninvasively via electroencephalography (EEG).

A groundbreaking study found that adults who sit for 10 or more hours daily face a significantly higher risk of dementia compared to those who sit less. The research, which tracked over 50,000 adults using wearable devices, revealed that the risk increases dramatically after crossing that 10-hour threshold.

We've always said that SuperAgers show that the aging brain can be biologically active, adaptable, flexible, but we didn't know why. This is biological proof that their brains are more plastic, and a real discovery that shows that neurogenesis of young neurons in the hippocampus may be a contributing factor.

Decades of research show that people who have more years of education, more cognitively demanding jobs or more mentally stimulating hobbies all tend to have a reduced risk of cognitive impairment as they get older. Experts think this is partly thanks to cognitive reserve: Basically, the more brain power you've built up over the years, the more you can stand to lose before you experience impairment.

Most people will forget a name, misplace their phone, or lose track of a conversation at some point. Usually, those moments pass without much thought. But for many adults, especially as they age, small lapses can trigger a much deeper fear: Is this the beginning of cognitive decline? As a neurologist, I hear this concern often. And as a researcher, I have learned something important: Worry about cognition and cognitive disease are not the same thing.

When I asked neurologists about their top behaviors for brain health, they all stressed the importance of physical activity. Exercise is top, No. 1, when we're thinking about the biggest bang for your buck, said Dr. Gregg Day, a neurologist at the Mayo Clinic. Numerous studies have shown that people who exercise regularly tend to perform better on attention, memory and executive functioning tests. There can be a small cognitive boost immediately after a workout, and the effects are sustained if people exercise consistently.

If you're going to prioritize one thing for your brain health, make it this: regular aerobic exercise. Multiple large-scale studies show that aerobic exercise doesn't just keep your heart healthy-it directly impacts your brain structure. One year of aerobic exercise in older adults led to significantly larger hippocampal volumes and better spatial memory. Other trials documented that exercise actually slows age-related gray matter volume loss.

But questions remain about the accuracy and uncertainty of these tests, and experts caution that the assays aren't ready for prime time. While the results here are encouraging, they are not yet at the level of having significant clinical benefit for individual patients, says Corey Bolton, a clinical neuropsychologist and an assistant professor of medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, who was not involved in the new study.

Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging. At such a critical moment in US history, we need reporters on the ground. Your donation allows us to keep sending journalists to speak to both sides of the story.

The team, which is being led by Jülich neurophysics professor Markus Diesmann, will leverage the Joint Undertaking Pioneer for Innovative and Transformative Exascale Research (JUPITER) supercomputer for their simulation. JUPITER is currently the fourth most powerful supercomputer in the world according to the TOP500 list, and features thousands of graphical processing units. The team demonstrated last month that a " spiking neural network " could be scaled up and run on JUPITER, effectively matching the cerebral cortex's 20 billion neurons and 100 trillion connections.

When a person suffers a stroke, physicians must restore blood flow to the brain as quickly as possible to save their life. But, ironically, that life-saving rush of blood can also trigger a second wave of damage - killing brain cells, fueling inflammation and increasing the odds of long-term disability. Now, in a study published in the journal Neurotherapeutics, Northwestern University scientists have developed an injectable regenerative nanomaterial that helps protect the brain during this vulnerable window.

A 33-year-old man survived for 48 hours without his lungs, after a medical team replaced the organs with an external artificial-lung system that it developed to keep him alive until he could receive a double lung transplant. There have been cases in which people have had their lungs removed and been connected to an external device to maintain oxygen levels.

Dementia is linked to changes in the brain. Health professionals used to assume that brain damage and dementia symptoms always went hand in hand. More recent research, however, shows that some people have significant brain damage yet never develop dementia. How can that be? In a previous post, I shared that dementia is defined by the inability to function in everyday life, such as getting lost in familiar places, having difficulty managing finances, forgetting to turn off the stove, or struggling with basic tasks.