It is estimated that 18% of women and 6% of men experience migraines. In fact, most medical visits for headache are due to migraine. Over a year ago, Dr. Larry Mccleary, former acting Chief of Pediatric Neurosurgery at Denver Children’s Hospital, shed light on the neural theory of migraine causation. In response to this article, numerous readers showed interest in knowing more about migraines basics and how to deal with it from a biopsychosocial perspective. So, we at Brain Blogger sought answers from the premier headache expert, Dr. Roger K. Cady, from the Headache Care Center in Springfield, Missouri. Read more →

The science of neurology has created a paradigm shift in our basic understanding of the structure of the brain and the rest of the human nervous system. It has taken a long time, and a large group of doctors, clinicians and assorted scientists to piece together the ways in which this new knowledge of the brain has direct application to the states of mind and body we call addiction, alcoholism, or drug dependence.

When I first began following the subject of addiction in the early 1990s, the addiction field was still small, the insights highly tentative. However, what I had originally viewed as a series of potential breakthroughs in addiction research very rapidly became the tip of an enormous iceberg: brain science, and the revolutionary new directions represented by modern biology. Read more →

The clinical diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) at the earliest clinical stages can be difficult. Given the variability in clinical threshold at which there is functional compromise in one’s social and professional life — a necessary component to AD diagnosis — there are several in-organic factors that affect early detection. Health professionals and biomedical scientists are searching for biomarkers, both biochemical or neuroimaging in nature, in order to objectively diagnose AD at various stages and provide invaluable prognostic information to the clinician. Whereas proteomic specialists have identified promising serum and CSF markers involved in AD pathophysiology (e.g. b-secretase, a key enzyme for amlyoid precursor protein cleavage), neuroradiologists have employed magnetic resonance in characterizing structural changes in the brain in vivo. Read more →

For many years the discussion over the existence of free will was limited to philosophers and theologians. Scientists started talking about free will once science started separating as a discipline from philosophy. However, it wasn’t until the rise of functional neuroimaging that some neuroscientists started studying if the brain and deterministic brain processes could explain away free will. In short, some scientists want to discover whether or not free will is merely an illusion, an idea humans create out of an innate desire to feel in control. Read more →

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a devastating neurological disorder which always results in death. This condition is often called Lou Gehrig’s disease after the American baseball player Henry Louis “Lou” Gehrig who died from disease complications in 1941 at the age of 37. In ALS nerve cells are damaged in a rapidly progressive fashion resulting in paralysis of all muscles. The usual cause of death is collapse of the respiratory system when these muscles become involved. Disease incidence peaks around the age of 60 and men are more commonly affected than women. Read more →

Parkinson’s disease (PD) and essential tremor are both primarily movement disorders. The symptoms are commonly confused with each other, mainly because essential tremor is not as well known as PD even though essential tremor is more prevalent. High-profile people like Michael J. Fox and Muhammad Ali raised our awareness of PD in the 1990s just like Pres. Ronald Reagan did with Alzheimer’s disease in the 1980s. Because of this, essential tremor is not as well-known to the general public even though more people suffer from it than from PD. Read more →