Tag Archives: neurology

Neck manipulation may be associated with stroke

Treatments involving neck manipulation may be associated with stroke, though it cannot be said with certainty that neck manipulation causes strokes, according to a new scientific statement published in the American Heart Association’s journal Stroke. Cervical artery dissection (CD) is a small tear in the layers of artery walls in the neck. It can result in ischemic stroke if a blood clot forms after a trivial or major trauma in the neck and later causes blockage of a blood vessel in the brain…

Even mild traumatic brain injury may cause brain damage

For the study, 44 people with a mild traumatic brain injury and nine people with a moderate traumatic brain injury were compared to 33 people with no brain injury. All of the participants took tests of their thinking and memory skills. At the same time, they had diffusion tensor imaging scans, a type of MRI scan that is more sensitive than traditional MRI for detecting damage to brain cells and helps map fiber tracts that connect brain regions. The people with brain injuries had their scans an average of six days after the injury. …

Common outcome measures required for neurofibromatosis clinical trials

The (REiNS) Collaboration was formed to achieve consensus regarding the design of clinical trials for treatments of NF and related disorders, with a focus on developing a standard set of appropriate and meaningful outcome measures. "This supplement presents the initial progress of several of the working groups and includes the first series of consensus recommendations for NF clinical trial endpoints by the REiNS International Collaboration," according to an introduction by Dr Scott R. …

New immunotherapy for malignant brain tumors

Animal experiments show that it is relatively easy to treat cancer in the early stages. However, it is far more difficult to successfully treat advanced cancer. Treatment of brain tumors is particularly challenging because regulatory T-cells accumulate in brain tumors and suppress an immune attack. …

Imaging studies may predict tumor response to anti-angiogenic drugs

"Two recent phase III trials of another anti-angiogenic drug, bevacizumab, showed no improvement in overall survival for glioblastoma patients, but our study suggests that only a subset of such patients will really benefit from these drugs," explains Tracy Batchelor, MD, director of the Pappas Center for Neuro-Oncology at the MGH Cancer Center and co-lead and corresponding author of the current study. "Our results also verify that normalization of tumor vasculature appears to be the way that anti-angiogenic drugs enhance the activity of chemotherapy and radiation treatment." Anti-angiogenic drugs, which block the action of factors that stimulate the growth of blood vessels, were first introduced for cancer treatment under the theory that they would act by ‘starving’ tumors of their blood supply…

Overexpressed protein to be culprit in certain thyroid cancers

The scientists found that over-activation of a certain protein in hormone-secreting cells helps fuel medullary thyroid cancer cells in mice as well as in human cells, making the protein a potentially good target for therapies to inhibit the growth of these cancer cells. The discovery by the multidisciplinary team at UT Southwestern has implications for neuroendocrine cancers that arise in organs farther removed from the brain, including the lung and the pancreas. Although rare, medullary thyroid cancer is often fatal. …