The National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute has awarded a nearly $5 million grant to the Johns Hopkins Children's Center for the establishment of a basic and translational research center that will consolidate research, treatment and care of adult and pediatric patients under one roof, speeding up the time between research and treatment.

"This center will be a marriage of all aspects of science and treatment, from basic science and clinical research to patient care and public health research, all part of the quest to treat and ultimately cure sickle cell disease," said lead investigator Dr. James F. Casella in a statement

A leukemia drug may help patients to treat strokes in a more effective and safer way, U.S. and Swedish researchers now say. The researchers used the leukemia drug known as imatinib (Gleevec) in mice and found that it greatly reduced bleeding, even if tissue plasminogen activator (tPA) wasn't given until five hours after a stroke began.

A tissue plasminogen activator (tPA), which works by dissolving clots and is the immediate treatment for common kind of strokes. The drug tPA however cause dangerous bleeding in the brain and its brain-saving power fades fast after the third hour of a stroke

Brain injuries from falling account for half of all elderly deaths, a new report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says. In 2005, brain injuries accounted for 50 percent of unintentional fall deaths and 8 percent of nonfatal fall-related hospitalizations among older adults.

Traumatic brain injuries, which are caused by a bump or blow to the head due to a fall, caused nearly 8,000 deaths and 56,000 hospitalizations in 2005 among Americans 65 and older, the study found

People with obstructive sleep apnea suffer tissue loss in brain regions that can seriously affect memory, a team of researchers from the University of California Los Angeles have found.

After doing MRI scans for tissues on the underside of the brain called mammillary bodies, the team discovered 43 disease sufferers had 20 percent smaller mammillary bodies than 66 participants without the disease

Low-birth weight children and children born prematurely are at a greater risk of developing autism than their healthier counterparts, new research shows.

The risk was especially pronounced among low birth-weight girls, said the authors of the study, which was published in the June issue of Pediatrics. Baby girls weighing less than 2.5 kilograms, or about 5.5 pounds, had 3.5 times increased risk of autism. Baby girls born more than seven weeks early had a 5.4 times increased risk