Tag: Alzheimer’s

Weekly Neuroscience Update

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Microscopic photos observed through changes of the flourescence of the synapse sensor (SynapShot) by cultivating the neurons of an experimental rat and expressing the SynapShot. The changes in the synapse that is created when the pre- and post-synaptic terminals come into contact and the synapse that disappears after a certain period of time are measured by the fluorescence of the SynapShot. Credit: KAIST Optogenetics & RNA therapeutics Lab

New research has observed the processes of memory and cognition in real-time.

A new study reveals significant findings in the fight against Long Covid. Through a comprehensive analysis of blood serum from 113 patients, researchers discovered changes in blood serum proteins related to the complement system, coagulation, and tissue injury in Long Covid patients.

New research has found that exercising both before and after learning optimizes memory formation, with a notable 10% improvement in remembering motor skills.

A new study employs generative AI to shed light on how the human brain processes memories for learning, imagination, and planning. The study used a computational model resembling the hippocampus and neocortex’s neural networks to simulate memory encoding and retrieval.

A new study has reported that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID, can infect dopamine neurons in the brain and trigger senescence—when a cell loses the ability to grow and divide.

Researchers have taken the first steps to treat Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease and Type 2 diabetes by creating multiple patent-pending compounds shown to inhibit protein aggregation associated with those diseases.

A neuroscientific study is paving the way for improving the diagnosis and treatment of Alzheimer’s.

A new study reveals limitations in the current use of mathematical models for personalized medicine, particularly in schizophrenia treatment. Although these models can predict patient outcomes in specific clinical trials, they fail when applied to different trials, challenging the reliability of AI-driven algorithms in diverse settings.

Research into the nature of memory reveals how cells that store information are stabilized over time.

A new study explores how infants and toddlers acquire language. Findings reveal early comprehension begins around 6-7 months, and significant improvements in language understanding occur around a child’s first birthday.

New research looks at ways to predict when a migraine attack will occur.

Researchers at the National Institutes of Health have found overactivation in many brain regions, including the frontal and parietal lobes and the amygdala, in unmedicated children with anxiety disorders. They also showed that treatment with cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) led to improvements in clinical symptoms and brain functioning.

An international research has proposed a new model for classifying Parkinson’s disease.

A ribbon of brain tissue called cortical gray matter grows thinner in people who go on to develop dementia, and this appears to be an accurate biomarker of the disease five to 10 years before symptoms appear, scientists report.

3D bioprinting sheds light on why blood vessel curvature may foster brain cancer metastasis.

Researchers achieved a significant advancement in robotics by replicating human-like variable speed walking using a musculoskeletal model. This model, steered by a reflex control method akin to the human nervous system, enhances our understanding of human locomotion and sets new standards for robotic technology.

There is a difference between how the brains of healthy older adults perceive color compared to younger adults, finds a new study.

Researchers conducted a study to explore the neuroscientific basis of fairness in social situations, investigating the interplay between personal interests and societal norms. By applying electric brain stimulation to 60 participants, the researchers pinpointed specific brain regions crucial to fairness decisions.

Finally this week, scientists have made a significant discovery using an artificial neural network model, suggesting that musical instinct may emerge naturally from the human brain.

Weekly Neuroscience Update

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Credit: eLife (2023)

Researchers have investigated the shared and unique neural processes that underlie different types of long-term memory: general semantic, personal semantic, and episodic memory, suggesting that these memory types all use the same network of the brain, rather than relying on different areas of the brain altogether. This questions a previous theory that characterizes general semantic and episodic memory as two distinct systems. Instead, the authors suggest that different long-term memory types could be viewed as a spectrum, where they rely on activating the same areas of the brain at differing magnitudes.

Scientists can now pinpoint where someone’s eyes are looking just by listening to their ears.

Using a specialized device that translates images into sound, neuroscientists have shown that people who are blind recognize basic faces using the part of the brain known as the fusiform face area, a region that is crucial for the processing of faces in sighted people.

People with long COVID exhibit patterns of changes in the brain that are different from fully recovered COVID-19 patients, according to new research.

What is the mechanism that allows our brains to incorporate new information about the world, and form memories? New work led by Dr. Tomás Ryan from Trinity College Dublin shows that learning occurs through the continuous formation of new connectivity patterns between specific engram cells in different regions of the brain.

New research indicates that acoustic stimulation of the brain may ease persistent symptoms in individuals who have experienced mild traumatic brain injury in the past.

Scientists have discovered that Alzheimer’s-related changes in brain networks extend beyond memory and attention, impacting sensory and motor circuits. These findings challenge previous assumptions about Alzheimer’s effects.

A pivotal discovery in addiction science has found a correlation between microstructural deficits in the prefrontal cortex-habenula tract and the development and maintenance of addiction.

Researchers have unveiled a pioneering technique for charting the intricate conversations occurring within our brains. Such insights are key to decoding behavioral alterations in neurological disease patients. The innovative tool, CaMPARI, allows scientists to witness brain activity in real-time, marking active neurons red and inactive ones green. This breakthrough could offer pathways to better treatments and understanding of diseases like Alzheimer’s.

A team of neuroscientists has found evidence suggesting that the neural development of babies still in the womb is impacted by the language they hear spoken by their mothers as they carry them.

A new study has discovered a link between a new gene pathway and structural brain anomalies in some people who stutter into adulthood, opening up promising research avenues to enhance the understanding of persistent developmental stuttering.

Finally this week, researchers have developed a tool that simplifies the identification of errors in neural networks used for image recognition.

Weekly Neuroscience Update

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Measuring changes in the activity of neurons in a cortical area while perturbing the activity in another area. Credit: Sainsbury Wellcome Centre

Researchers have discovered how two neocortical areas in the brain communicate with one another and found that their influence on each other changes over much faster timescales than previously thought.

Neuroscientists using MRI scans discovered that psychopathic people have a 10% larger striatum, a cluster of neurons in the subcortical basal ganglia of the forebrain, than regular people. This represents a clear biological distinction between psychopaths and non-psychopathic people.

Glycan, a special sugar protein, appears to play a significant role in the development of Alzheimer’s disease.

Genetic studies have offered clues, identifying genes associated with Autism Spectrum Disorder, but despite finding many pieces to the puzzle, scientists have not yet figured out how they all fit together, and why there is such wide variation in ASD symptoms. Now an international team of scientists report significant progress in understanding how the combined effects of rare mutations and common genetic variation determine whether a child will develop ASD.

Researchers identify the exertion level where aerosol particle emission increases exponentially, offering an explanation as to why exercise intensity may be linked to the transmission of infections.

The dopaminergic system appears to play an important but overlooked role in LSD’s effects on consciousness, according to new research published in the journal Psychopharmacology. The findings provide new insight into the neurophysiological mechanisms responsible for the unique effects of psychedelic drugs.

Finally this week, a new study has identified potential targets to develop a therapy that could prevent Alzheimer’s disease.

Weekly Neuroscience Update

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This cross-section of the hippocampus shows island cells (green) projecting to the CA1 region of the hippocampus. (Credit: Takashi Kitamura)

This cross-section of the hippocampus shows island cells (green) projecting to the CA1 region of the hippocampus. (Credit: Takashi Kitamura)

Neuroscientists have discovered how two neural circuits in the brain work together to control the formation of time-linked memories. This is a critical ability that helps the brain to determine when it needs to take action to defend against a potential threat.

Survivors of traumatic brain injuries (TBI) are three times more likely to die prematurely, often from suicide or fatal injuries, according to a study from Oxford University.

An international team of researchers has found that the cause of schizophrenia is even more complex than already believed, with rare gene mutations contributing to the disorder. In two studies published in the journal Nature, they show that schizophrenia arises from the combined effects of many genes.

Scientists have found that, to allow us to concentrate, we synchronize different regions of our brains in a process that the researchers describe as “roughly akin to tuning multiple walkie-talkies to the same frequency.”

Researchers have identified a protein in the brain that plays a critical role in the memory loss seen in Alzheimer’s patients, according to a study to be published in the journal Nature Neuroscience.

Using a simple study of eye movements, scientists report evidence that people who are less patient tend to move their eyes with greater speed. The findings, the researchers say, suggest that the weight people give to the passage of time may be a trait consistently used throughout their brains, affecting the speed with which they make movements, as well as the way they make certain decisions.

Researchers have found that epileptic activity can spread through a part of the brain in a new way, suggesting a possible novel target for seizure-blocking medicines.

Weekly Neuroscience Update

UCL Medical staff discussing an image of a human brain

Researchers at University College London have made a breakthrough in the way that drugs could be delivered to the brain, tackling the difficult problem of constructing drugs which are able to pass through the blood-brain barrier – a mechanism which prevents many chemicals in the bloodstream from passing into the brain, including synthetic compounds administered as medication as well as harmful environmental toxins.

For older adults looking to sharpen their mental abilities, it might be time to log on to Facebook. Preliminary research findings from the University of Arizona suggest that men and women older than 65 who learn to use Facebook could see a boost in cognitive function.

A single concussion may cause lasting structural damage to the brain, according to a new study published online in the journal Radiology.

In an effort to better evaluate and prevent concussions and head traumas, researchers at Johns Hopkins University have developed a computer model to identify what types of jarring movements to the body can cause injury to the brain

A team of sleep researchers has confirmed the mechanism that enables the brain to consolidate memory and found that a commonly prescribed sleep aid enhances the process. Those discoveries could lead to new sleep therapies that will improve memory for aging adults and those with dementia, Alzheimer’s and schizophrenia.

How do neurons store information about past events? In the Nencki Institute of Experimental Biology of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, a previously unknown mechanism of memory trace formation has been discovered. It appears that at least some events are remembered thanks to geometry.

It is possible to tell who a person is thinking about by analyzing images of his or her brain. Our mental models of people produce unique patterns of brain activation, which can be detected using advanced imaging techniques according to a study by Cornell University neuroscientist Nathan Spreng and his colleagues.

Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC) researchers have found the first evidence that selective activation of the dentate gyrus, a portion of the hippocampus, can reduce anxiety without affecting learning.

Weekly Neuroscience Update

medium_6835040374Two recent pieces of work raise the prospect of being able to predict and even regulate a person’s risk-taking behavior, by first observing activity of the anterior cingulate cortex and then dialing it up or down.

A new study shows that for millions of individuals around the world who suffer from Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD), anger is more than an emotion; it’s an agent that exacerbates their illness.

Brain changes persist for months in children who have sustained a mild traumatic brain injury, or concussion, U.S. researchers say.

Chinese researchers have devised a new technique for reprogramming cells from human urine into immature brain cells that can form multiple types of functioning neurons and glial cells. The technique, published in the journal Nature Methods, could prove useful for studying the cellular mechanisms of neurodegenerative conditions such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s and for testing the effects of new drugs that are being developed to treat them.

Researchers have discovered how the brain assesses confidence in its decisions. The findings explain why some people have better insight into their choices than others.

Scientists have combined and translated two kinds of brain wave recordings into music, transforming one recording (EEG) to create the pitch and duration of a note, and the other (fMRI) to control the intensity of the music.

A compassion-based meditation program can significantly improve a person’s ability to read the facial expressions of others, finds a study published by Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience. This boost in empathic accuracy was detected through both behavioral testing of the study participants and through functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans of their brain activity.

Your brain has at least four different senses of location — and perhaps as many as 10. And each is different, according to new research from the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience, at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.

photo credit: Amanda Nicole Betley via photopin cc

Weekly Round Up: Brain Research

Scientists now have a better understanding of the way that stress impacts the brain. New research, published by Cell Press in the January 26 issue of the journal Neuron, reveals pioneering evidence for a new mechanism of stress adaptation and may eventually lead to a better understanding of why prolonged and repeated exposure to stress can lead to anxiety disorders and depression.

Men may be at higher risk of experiencing mild cognitive impairment (MCI), or the stage of mild memory loss that occurs between normal aging and dementia, than women, according to a study published in the January 25, 2012, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.

Scientists have estimated for the first time the extent to which genes determine changes in intelligence across the human life course.

Researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine have created a new generation of fast-acting fluorescent dyes that optically highlight electrical activity in neuronal membranes. The work is published in this week’s online Early Edition of theProceedings of the National Academy of Science.

A new study led by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, provides even more reason for people to read a book or do a puzzle, and to make such activities a lifetime habit. Brain scans revealed that people with no symptoms of Alzheimer’s who engaged in cognitively stimulating activities throughout their lives had fewer deposits of beta-amyloid, a destructive protein that is the hallmark of the disease.