Brain Health

An 11-year-old Albany girl who became sick on a camping trip and died the next day was New York state's first human rabies death since 1954, health officials have confirmed. It's still not known how Kelly Ahrendt, who died July 14, contracted rabies. Tests on the sixth-grader's brain tissue confirmed that the rabies virus caused her death from viral encephalitis, an inflammation of the brain, health officials said.

They were born within minutes of each other nearly 80 years ago, and on April 13, jazz great Quincy Jones and British actor Michael Caine will celebrate their birthdays together at a star-studded party at the MGM Grand resort. The Power of Love Gala is a fundraiser for the Las Vegas -based Cleveland Clinic Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health . Tickets start at $1,500 a person, but the price includes an evening's worth of activities, beginning with a dinner prepared by celebrity chefs Wolfgang Puck and Gordon Ramsay.

Hormone therapy appears to affect the brain differently depending on the age of the woman when she receives it, researchers reported Thursday. Hormone-replacement therapy for women has been the subject of considerable debate. Studies have shown both pros and cons. But hormone use has declined in the last decade because a major study on the issue, the Women's Health Initiative , found that the risks of taking hormones appeared to outweigh significantly the benefits in older postmenopausal women.

Walking may put the brakes on cognitive decline in healthy older people as well as those with cognitive impairment, a new study finds. The ongoing study, which spans 20 years, also quantified how much walking is necessary to keep brain volume up. Researchers followed 426 older adults for a number of years to see if there were changes in brain volume. Among the participants 299 were healthy, and 127 had cognitive impairments, including 83 with mild cognitive impairment, and 44 with Alzheimer's disease.

It turned a whole town into a research lab. It was the first to show the world that high cholesterol and obesity put people at risk for heart disease -- the first, in fact, to coin the very term "risk factor." And it still hasn't run out of juice. The longest-running heart health study in the world, the 60-year-old Framingham Heart Study, continues to mine its vast data set for causes or signs of heart trouble.

It can be hard to explain how your world looks to someone whose reality is very different. That's especially true for people with epilepsy and aura-filled migraines. Increasingly, instead of struggling to explain with words, people with these illnesses are producing art that does a better job. The artists begin to feel less isolated and alone. Their doctors get a better understanding of the symptoms they are trying to treat. And researchers gain new insights into how some neurological diseases affect the brain.

Omega-3 fatty-acid supplements, often called fish-oil capsules, did not curb the mental decline in people with mild to moderate Alzheimer's disease, researchers said Tuesday. The study marks yet another attempt to treat the disease that has failed in clinical trials. Treatment with omega-3 supplements had generated considerable enthusiasm because, unlike the other unsuccessful experimental therapies, it was a natural therapy and would not have required development of a new prescription drug.

Japanese doctors prepared today to carry out the nation's first heart transplant in 31 years. The potential donor, a 44-year-old woman who suffered a cerebral hemorrhage, would be the nation's first organ donor legally defined as brain-dead under a 1997 law. The donor's heart, lungs, liver and kidneys will be quickly transplanted in recipients selected by the Japan Organ Transplant Network.

Artist Katherine Sherwood was just 44 when a hemorrhage in her brain's left hemisphere paralyzed the right side of her body — forever changing her artwork. Before the stroke in 1997, her mixed-media paintings featured strange and cryptic images: medieval seals, transvestites, bingo cards. Reviewers called her work cerebral and deliberate. Creativity, says the UC Berkeley professor, was an intellectual and often angst-filled struggle. After the stroke, she could no longer paint on canvases mounted vertically, so she laid them flat, moving around them in a chair with wheels.

You may have heard the advice "If you exercise, you'll live longer." The good news -- or the bad news, if you hate doing anything more active than downloading iTunes -- is that it's true. Research backs this up. A 2007 study in the Journal of the American Medical Assn. found that fitter people lived longer, even if they had extra pounds around the middle.