Sichuan's fragmented transportation system prevents Chengdu from rivaling the eastern powerhouses as a manufacturing center, but the city is promoting the advantage of its plentiful, relatively low-cost brain pool with its new research corridor, the West High-Tech Zone.
To manage the larger number of patients and the connected health costs, brain research will have to direct a sharp focus towards developing neurorestorative and neuroprotective treatments.
Emerging countries are no longer content to be sources of cheap hands and low-cost brains.
At the same time, however, brains are expensive: on a mass-specific basis, the metabolic cost of brain function is among the highest of any organ [4], [5].
This increase must have come at a cost, because brain tissue expends significant amounts of energy.
And the cost of "brain drain" from poor countries is partly mitigated by the remittances sent home.
Roughly "95% of all imaging studies have maybe 20 participants per group," largely because of the cost of brain scans, which can run roughly $500 to $600 per person, he says.
In Europe, much data on both the economic costs of migraine have been collected and presented in connection with the "Cost of Brain Disorders in Europe" project [3], in which migraine is treated along with many of the other (neurological and psychiatric) "brain disorders".
For the headache part of the "Cost of Brain Disorders in Europe" project, a literature search for studies containing cost data for migraine and other headaches identified eight European studies evaluating the direct or indirect costs of migraine from a societal perspective [20], from France [22, 23], Germany [24], The Netherlands [25], Spain [26], Sweden [27] and the UK [28, 29].
However, there is one organ that should be avoided at all cost: the brain.
