Cecile G. Tamura Lifeboat Foundation An effective treatment for depression from a systematic review of 200 unique RCTs:
Exercise.
Objective To identify the optimal dose and modality of exercise for treating major depressive disorder, compared with psychotherapy, antidepressants, and control conditions.
Design Systematic review and network meta-analysis.
Summary: Researchers developed 20 novel recombinant rabies viral vectors that present unparalleled advantages for neural circuit mapping in aging and Alzheimer’s disease studies. These vectors are engineered to highlight microstructural changes in brain neurons through enhanced fluorescent proteins, offering insights into neural networks at both micro and macro scales.
The vectors’ unique ability to target specific neuron components and perform live imaging makes them potent tools for dissecting neural circuitry in healthy and diseased states. This innovation opens new pathways for targeted treatment strategies and will be shared with the neuroscience community through UCI’s Center for Neural Circuit Mapping.
Mentalization – inferring other’s emotions and intentions – is crucial for human social interactions and is impaired in various brain disorders. While previous neuroscience research has focussed on static mentalization strategies, we know little about how the brain decides adaptively which strategies to employ at any moment of time. Here we investigate this core aspect of mentalization with computational modeling and fMRI during interactive strategic games. We find that most participants can adapt their strategy to the changing sophistication of their opponents, but with considerable individual differences. Model-based fMRI analyses identify a distributed brain network where activity tracks this mentalization-belief adaptation.
Consciousness appears to arise naturally as a result of a brain maximizing its information content. So says a group of scientists in Canada and France, which has studied how the electrical activity in people’s brains varies according to individuals’ conscious states. The researchers find that normal waking states are associated with maximum values of what they call a brain’s “entropy”
Statistical mechanics is very good at explaining the macroscopic thermodynamic properties of physical systems in terms of the behaviour of those systems’ microscopic constituent particles. Emboldened by this success, physicists have increasingly been trying to do a similar thing with the brain: namely, using statistical mechanics to model networks of neurons. Key to this has been the study of synchronization – how the electrical activity of one set of neurons can oscillate in phase with that of another set. Synchronization in turn implies that those sets of neurons are physically tied to one another, just as oscillating physical systems, such as pendulums, become synchronized when they are connected together.
The latest work stems from the observation that consciousness, or at least the proper functioning of brains, is associated not with high or even low degrees of synchronicity between neurons but by middling amounts. Jose Luis Perez Velazquez, a biochemist at the University of Toronto, and colleagues hypothesized that what is maximized during consciousness is not connectivity itself but the number of different ways that a certain degree of connectivity can be achieved.
As the opioid crisis worsens, one Boston-based pharmaceutical company has used some impressive biology to create what it says amounts to a non-addictive, non-opioid painkiller.
As the New York Times reports, Vertex Pharmaceuticals seems to have shown some promising results in Phase 3 clinical trials, announced earlier this week in a statement, for patients who experienced “moderate-to-severe acute pain” after getting surgery.
Whereas opioids generally target both the brain and the body, which ultimately leads to their addictiveness, non-opioid drugs like Vertex’s VX-548 focus on peripheral nerves, or those outside of the brain and spine, the NYT explains. By blocking pain at the source, the logic goes, it can be averted before reaching the brain and developing the kind of feedback loop that lends itself to dependency.
Ever struggle to choose your next move? 😫
In the study, authors reveal new geometric principles of bifurcations during spatiotemporal decision-making and demonstrate that a non-Euclidean neural representation of space simplifies decision-making in multi-target environments.
Results from phase two clinical trials at UT Southwestern Medical Center showed that a suspension of gold nanocrystals taken daily by patients with multiple sclerosis (MS) and Parkinson’s disease (PD) significantly reversed deficits of metabolites linked to energy activity in the brain and resulted in functional improvements.
The findings, published in the Journal of Nanobiotechnology (“Evidence of brain target engagement in Parkinson’s disease and multiple sclerosis by the investigational nanomedicine, CNM-Au8, in the REPAIR phase 2 clinical trials”), could eventually help bring this treatment to patients with these and other neurodegenerative diseases, according to the authors.
Gold nanocrystals suspended in a water buffer represent a novel therapeutic agent developed by Clene Nanomedicine for neurodegenerative conditions. This nanomedicine, called CNM-Au8, is being investigated to treat patients with multiple sclerosis and Parkinson’s disease in clinical trials at UT Southwestern. (Illustration: Random 42/Source: Clene Nanomedicine)
Summary: Researchers uncovered the mechanisms by which oxytocin (OXT) influences learning and memory in animals. Their study utilized pharmacogenetic techniques to activate specific OXT neurons within the brain, assessing the impact on cognitive functions through tasks like the Novel Object Recognition Task (NORT).
The findings reveal that activating OXTergic neurons significantly enhances long-term object recognition memory, with notable activity observed in the brain’s supramammillary nucleus (SuM) and dentate gyrus. This groundbreaking research not only deepens our understanding of oxytocin’s role beyond social bonding but also suggests its potential in developing treatments for dementia.
Nerve cells in the brain demand an enormous amount of energy to survive and maintain their connections for communicating with other nerve cells. In Alzheimer’s disease, the ability to make energy is compromised, and the connections between nerve cells (called synapses) eventually come apart and wither, causing new memories to fade and fail.
A Scripps Research team, reporting in the journal Advanced Science, has now identified the energetic reactions in brain cells that malfunction and lead to neurodegeneration. By using a small molecule to address the malfunction, which occurred in the mitochondria—the cell’s major energy producers—the researchers showed that many neuron-to-neuron connections were successfully restored in nerve cell models derived from human Alzheimer’s patient stem cells. These findings highlight that improving mitochondrial metabolism could be a promising therapeutic target for Alzheimer’s and related disorders.
“We thought that if we could repair metabolic activity in the mitochondria, maybe we could salvage the energy production,” says senior author Stuart Lipton, MD, Ph.D., Step Family Foundation Endowed Professor and Co-Director of the Neurodegeneration New Medicines Center at Scripps Research, and a clinical neurologist in La Jolla, Calif. “In using human neurons derived from people with Alzheimer’s, protecting the energy levels was sufficient to rescue a large number of neuronal connections.”
Scientists at the University of Wisconsin–Madison (UWM) say they have created the first 3D-printed brain organoids that function like natural brain tissue.
“The neurons communicate, send signals, interact with each other through neurotransmitters, and even form proper networks with support cells that were added to the printed tissue,” said senior author Su-Chun Zhang.
The challenge: In the right conditions, stem cells will self-assemble into tiny, three-dimensional tissues that mimic features of the human brain. These “brain organoids” can be used to test drugs, study diseases, and more.