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The fact of repeated impacts to the brain causing brain damage made news.  A private university will pay $7.5 million to provide lifetime care to a former football player who suffered a severe brain injury in a 2005 game after an earlier concussion went untreated.

The family of Preston Plevretes, 23, of New Jersey, settled their lawsuit against La Salle University.

The settlement came as the NFL, the NCAA and other governing bodies review rules about when athletes should return to play following concussions, amid research that suggests returning too soon can lead to brain damage.

Read more: http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2009/football/ncaa/wires/11/30/2060.ap.fbc.football.concussion.lawsuit.3rd.ld.writethru.0664/#ixzz0Z1OZ8nRV
 

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The American Psychological Association notes that Holiday stress is a leading cause of financial stress for Americans.   National unemployment levels push into double digits for the first time in decades, the American Psychological Association's (APA) newest Stress in America survey finds that Americans continue to cite financial concerns as leading sources of stress.

Approximately seven in ten Americans report that money is a significant source of stress (71 percent), according to APA's 2009 Stress in America survey, with similarly high percentages reporting stress resulting from work (69 percent) and the economy (63 percent). More than half of adults (55 percent) also cited family responsibilities as a significant source of stress in their lives.

APA suggests the following strategies to manage holiday stress and enjoy the season:

1. Take time for yourself. Taking care of yourself helps you to take better care of others in your life. Go for a long walk or take time out to read or listen to your favorite music. By slowing down you will actually have more energy to accomplish your goals.

2. Volunteer. Many charitable organizations face new challenges as a result of the ongoing economic downturn. Find a local charity, such as a soup kitchen or a shelter, where you and your family can volunteer together. Helping others who are less fortunate can put hardships in perspective and can build stronger family relationships.

3. Set realistic expectations. No holiday celebration is perfect; view inevitable missteps as opportunities to demonstrate flexibility and resilience. Create a realistic budget and remind your children that the holidays aren't about expensive gifts.

4. Remember what's important. Commercialism can overshadow the true sentiment of the holiday season. When your holiday expense list is running longer than your monthly budget, scale back. Remind yourself that family, friends and the relationships in our lives are what matter most.

5. Seek support. Talk about stress related to the holidays with your friends and family. Getting things out in the open can help you navigate your feelings and work toward a solution. If you continue to feel overwhelmed, consider talking with a professional such as a psychologist to help you develop coping strategies and better manage your stress. A psychologist has the skills and professional training to help people learn to manage stress and cope more effectively with life problems, using techniques based on best available research and their clinical skills and experience, and taking into account an individual's unique values, goals and circumstances. Psychologists have doctoral degrees and are licensed by the state in which they practice. They receive one of the highest levels of education of all health care professionals, spending an average of seven years in education and training after they receive their undergraduate degrees.

Read more here.

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According to Medilexicon's medical dictionary:

Cluster headache is "possibly due to a hypersensitivity to histamine; characterized by recurrent, severe, unilateral orbitotemporal headaches associated with ipsilateral photophobia, lacrimation, and nasal congestion."

Cluster headaches (also used in singular: headache), also nicknamed suicide headaches, occur several times a day, they come on unexpectedly, do not last long, and are generally very painful. The pain is usually intense, and sometimes only on one side of the head. Frequently, the sufferer also feels pain around the eye.

A cluster-headache sufferer can wake up during the night because of the pain. Often, this occurs at the same time each night. The eye on the painful side of the head may be reddened and watery. The individual's nose may be runny or blocked on the side of the nose where the pain is.

Read more here.

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A new study published in the Scientific Journal Neurology reveals that women who store fat on their waist in middle age are more than twice as likely to develop dementia when they get older.

The most common symptoms of dementia are forgetfulness, impaired speech and problems with recognition and orientation. It is a condition that can affect all our mental faculties and which is more common as we get older. Around seven per cent of the population over the age of 65 and just over 20 per cent of the over-80s have severe dementia.

Dementia isn't a specific disease. Instead, it describes a group of symptoms affecting intellectual and social abilities severely enough to interfere with daily functioning. It's caused by conditions or changes in the brain. Different types of dementia exist, depending on the cause. Alzheimer's disease is the most common type.

Memory loss generally occurs in dementia, but memory loss alone doesn't mean you have dementia. Dementia indicates problems with at least two brain functions, such as memory loss along with impaired judgment or language. Dementia can make you confused and unable to remember people and names. You may also experience changes in personality and social behavior. However, some causes of dementia are treatable and even reversible.

Dementia symptoms vary depending on the cause, but common signs and symptoms include:

Memory loss
Difficulty communicating
Inability to learn or remember new information
Difficulty with planning and organizing
Difficulty with coordination and motor functions
Personality changes
Inability to reason
Inappropriate behavior
Paranoia
Agitation
Hallucinations
 

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Size is not what counts in the hunt for the most intelligent.  Whales have brains weighing 9 kg (with over 200 billion nerve cells), and human brains vary between 1.25 kg and 1.45 kg (with an estimated 85 billion nerve cells). A honeybee's brain weighs only 1 milligram and contains fewer than a million nerve cells. 
 

Insects may have tiny brains, but they can perform some seriously impressive feats of mental gymnastics.

According to a growing number of studies, some insects can count, categorize objects, even recognize human faces -- all with brains the size of pinheads.

WATCH VIDEO: Take a closer look at the lives of mosquitoes, maggots and other creepy crawlies.

Despite many attempts to link the volume of an animal's brain with the depth of its intelligence, scientists now propose that it's the complexity of connections between brain cells that matters most. Studying those connections -- a more manageable task in a little brain than in a big one -- could help researchers understand how bigger brains, including those of humans, work.

Scientists at Queen Mary, University of London, state that contrary to popular belief, we can't say that brain size predicts the capacity for intelligent behavior.

Research repeatedly shows how insects are capable of some intelligent behaviors scientists previously thought were unique to larger animals.

Research suggests that bigger animals may need bigger brains simply because there is more to control - for example they need to move bigger muscles and therefore need more and bigger nerves to move them.

The entire article is presented in the journal Current Biology.  Read more here.

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The Dana Foundation released Neuroeducation: Learning, Arts, and the Brain, its newest free education resource. The book, the culmination of a summit sponsored by The Johns Hopkins University School of Education's Neuro-Education Initiative, focuses on the convergence of neuroscientific research and teaching and learning, with an emphasis on the arts.
 

 Education and brain experts discuss their experiences, challenges, and potential next steps to allow for the crossover from classroom to lab and lab to classroom. The concerns and hopes of those working in the field are presented in a summary of the roundtable discussions that served as the centerpiece of the summit.

Neuroeducation: Learning, Arts, and the Brain is available free by written request on institutional letterhead. Please make certain your request contains a complete telephone number-including area code-and a full street address. Requests should be mailed or faxed to:

Johanna Goldberg
Dana Foundation
745 Fifth Avenue, Suite 900
New York, NY 10151
Fax: (212) 317-8721

You may also e-mail your request to: jgoldberg@dana.org. Please include your institutional and mailing information.

The book is available online at http://www.dana.org/news/publications/publication.aspx?id=23964.
 

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According to an AP poll 54% of Americans favor limiting their right to recover from doctors and hospitals for their mistakes.  Nevada passed the Keep Our Doctors in Nevada bill in 2004.

The AP poll found that 54 percent of Americans favor making it harder to sue doctors and hospitals for mistakes taking care of patients, while 32 percent are opposed. The rest are undecided or don't know.

Support for limits on malpractice lawsuits cuts across political lines, with 58 percent of independents and 61 percent of Republicans in favor. Democrats are more divided. Still, 47 percent said they favor making it harder to sue, while 37 percent are opposed.

The survey was conducted by Stanford University with the nonprofit Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

This study can be seen here.

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A presentation by the American Heart Association's (AHA) annual Scientific Sessions in Orlando revealed the pooling results from 21 studies, involving 622,381 men and women, to conclude that the risk of stroke for those with migraines is 2.3 times those without.

Researchers at Johns Hopkins have affirmed that migraine headaches are associated with more than twofold higher chances of the most common kind of stroke: those occurring when blood supply to the brain is suddenly cut off by the buildup of plaque or a blood clot.

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A new study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) promises to improve diagnosis and monitoring of Alzheimer's disease.  Scientists at the University of California, San Diego have developed a fast and accurate method for quantifying subtle, sub-regional brain volume loss using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). 

The general pattern of brain atrophy resulting from Alzheimer's disease has long been known through autopsy studies, but exploiting this knowledge toward accurate diagnosis and monitoring of the disease has only recently been made possible by improvements in computational algorithms that automate identification of brain structures with MRI. The new methods described in the study provide rapid identification of brain sub-regions combined with measures of change in these regions across time. The methods require at least two brain scans to be performed on the same MRI scanner over a period of several months. The new research shows that changes in the brain's memory regions, in particular a region of the temporal lobe called the entorhinal cortex, offer sensitive measures of the early stages of the disease.
 

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