Neural Linkage Between Motivation And Motor Functional Recovery Through Rehabilitative Training

An effective recovery has been observed instroke patients and those with spinal cord injuries who have strong vitality and motivation to rehabilitate in clinical practice. However, it was not really clear how motivation facilitates functional recovery in brain science. The joint research team consisting of Associate Professor Yukio NISHIMURA, and Professor Tadashi ISA from the National Institute for Physiological Sciences, Dr. Hirotaka ONOE, Team Leader in the Functional Probe Research Laboratory of RIKEN, the Center for Molecular Imaging Science, and also Dr. Hideo TSUKADA, Manager of PET Center, Hamamatsu Photonics K.K., Central Research Laboratory, revealed that the more motor function recovery progresses, the stronger the functional connectivity between the brain which regulates motivation, and in the brain regions involved in the motor learning and functional recovery. This occurs through rehabilitative training of macaque monkeys after the spinal cord injuries. The result of this study suggests that the functional recovery of motor system for a patient with damage to the central nervous system can be advanced effectively, by activating the brain region which controls "motivation". The result of this study was reported in PLoS ONE, an American science magazine (September 28, 2011 electronic edition). 
Link:http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/releases/235206.php

Yoga Reduces The Physical And Psychological Symptoms Of Chronic Pain In Women With Fibromyalgia

The study is the first to look at the effects of yoga on cortisol levels in women withfibromyalgia. The condition, which predominantly affects women, is characterized by chronic pain and fatigue; common symptoms include muscle stiffness, sleep disturbances, gastrointestinal discomfort, anxiety and depression.

Previous research has found that women with fibromyalgia have lower-than-average cortisol levels, which contribute to pain,fatigue and stress sensitivity. According to the study, participants' saliva revealed elevated levels of total cortisol following a program of 75 minutes of hatha yoga twice weekly over the course of eight weeks.

"Ideally, our cortisol levels peak about 30-40 minutes after we get up in the morning and decline throughout the day until we're ready to go to sleep," says the study's lead author, Kathryn Curtis, a PhD student in York's Department of Psychology, Faculty of Health. "The secretion of the hormone, cortisol, is dysregulated in women with fibromyalgia" she says.
Link:http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/releases/231970.php

Back Pain Recovery Time Unclear, Causing Many Problems To Become Chronic

According to professionals at the 7th EFIC Congress - Pain in Europe VII Hamburg, the prognosis for unspecific back pain which is already an epidemic in industrialized countries, has been worse than commonly recognized. This pain, which cannot be linked to any specific disease, needs further research and rehabilitation efforts if treatment methods are to be increased and enhanced. There is some hope that such efforts may develop.

(EFIC stands for European Federation of IASP® Chapters. A multidisciplinary professional organization in the field of pain research and medicine.)
Link:http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/235011.php

Cardiac Rehabilitation Improves Heart Rate Recovery, Boosts Survival

For the first time, researchers have discovered cardiac rehabilitation can train the heart to quickly return to its normal rate after exercise.

In a study reported in Circulation: Journal of the American Heart Association, researchers said heart disease patients with normal heart rate recovery live longer than those with slow heart rate recovery. A heart that returns to normal rate more quickly works better than one that stays revved up for a while.

"There's no medicine that can do that," said Leslie Cho, M.D., lead author of the study and director of the Women's Cardiovascular Center at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio. "Especially in terms of mortality, if we had a medicine that could make this dramatic an impact, it would be the blockbuster drug of the century." 
Link:
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/releases/235038.php

Researchers Move Closer to Objectively Quantifying Pain

Pain management is one of the most difficult areas of medicine. Clinicians have little to go on beyond patients' self-reports, which can be highly variable. If doctors underestimate a patient's pain, they risk causing unnecessary suffering, but if they employ a better-safe-than-sorry approach, they risk over-medicating with drugs that are increasingly associated with abuse.

There have been various attempts to quantify pain as a physiological phenomenon, but none have proved effective enough to replace self-reporting. Now researchers at Stanford University have published a study of a promising fMRI-based solution.

The researchers used a machine-learning algorithm to recognize specific patterns in the fMRI data. They then found an association between certain patterns and pain in both self-reporting and non-reporting patients, implying a high degree of similarity across subjects. Although specific brain areas, such as the secondary somatosensory cortex, were implicated in the study, the researchers found that a whole-brain approach was more accurate at predicting pain than any individual brain region on its own (86.6 percent, compared to 71.9 percent for the secondary somatosensory cortex and 64.3 percent for a region called the mid-insular cortex).

The next step is to try to make the model robust enough to distinguish between different types of pain--for example, thermal versus mechanical--and to localize where on the body the pain is being experienced. Physicians will probably always have to rely on patient descriptions of pain to some degree, but experiments such as these offer hope that they will soon be able to bolster those qualitative ratings with more objective measurements, which should improve treatment outcomes.

Source:POSTED BY: ERICA WESTLY  /  THU, SEPTEMBER 22, 2011

http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/biomedical/diagnostics/researchers-move-closer-to-objectively-quantifying-pain

Older Brains Benefit From Learning By Trial And Error

Canadian researchers have found the first evidence that older brains get more benefit than younger brains from learning information the hard way - via trial-and-error learning.

The study was led by scientists at Baycrest's world-renowned Rotman Research Institute in Toronto and appears online in the journalPsychology and Aging, ahead of the print edition.

The finding will surprise professional educators and cognitive rehabilitation clinicians as it challenges a large body of published science which has shown that making mistakes while learning information hurts memory performance for older adults, and that passive "errorless" learning (where the correct answer is provided) is better suited to older brains.

"The scientific literature has traditionally embraced errorless learning for older adults. However, our study has shown that if older adults are learning material that is very conceptual, where they can make a meaningful relationship between their errors and the correct information that they are supposed to remember, in those cases the errors can actually be quite beneficial for the learning process," said Andreé-Ann Cyr, the study's lead investigator. Source:
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/releases/233314.php

Virtual Reality May Help Adults Recover From Stroke

Early results suggest that using virtual reality (VR) human-computer interfaces might help adult stroke patients regain arm function and improve their ability to perform standard tasks, when compared to patients who don't use VR. The findings are reported in a new review published in The Cochrane Library.

Virtual reality interfaces allow people to become immersed in a computer-generated environment. Most people are used to these in the form of video games, but they show potential as a therapeutic tool. "Virtual reality and interactive video gaming may have some advantages over traditional therapy as they may give people an opportunity to practice everyday activities that cannot be practiced within the hospital environment," says the review's leader Kate Laver, who works in the Department of Rehabilitation and Aged Care at Flinders University, Adelaide, Australia....Source:
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/releases/233981.php