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Category: neuroscience – Page 193

Gold nanocrystals have shown promise in reversing neurological deficits in patients with multiple sclerosis (MS) and Parkinson’s disease (PD).

Gold nanocrystals show promise to reverse neurological deficits in patients with multiple sclerosis (MS) and Parkinson’s disease (PD).

In the clinical trials, this nanomedicine exhibited the ability to solve energy-related disorders in patients’ brains.

These clinical studies were done by researchers from the UT Southwestern Medical Center, and the nanocrystals were administered to the patients regularly for 12 weeks.

Continue reading “Study: Gold nanocrystals may reverse Parkinson’s neurological deficit” | >

A head injury serious enough to affect brain function, such as that caused by a car accident or sudden fall, leads to changes in the brain beyond the site of impact, Tufts University School of Medicine scientists report in the journal Cerebral Cortex. In an animal model of traumatic brain injury, the researchers found that both hemispheres work together to forge new neural pathways in an attempt to replicate those that were lost.

“Even areas far away from the injury behaved differently immediately afterward,” says first author Samantha Bottom-Tanzer, an MD/Ph. D. student in neuroscience at the School of Medicine. “Traumatic brain injury research tends to focus on the region of injury, but this study makes a good case that the entire brain can be affected, and imaging in distal regions can provide valuable information.”

Bottom-Tanzer and colleagues are the first to use an combining fluorescent sensors of neuronal activity and electrodes to record how many parts of the brain talk to each other after a brain injury. The team tracked neural activity in mice for up to three weeks post-injury during periods of exercise and rest.

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In a study published in Advanced Materials, researchers have demonstrated that an innovative nano-vector (nanogel), which they developed, is able to deliver anti-inflammatory drugs in a targeted manner into glial cells actively involved in the evolution of spinal cord injury, a condition that leads to paraplegia or quadriplegia.

Treatments currently available to modulate the mediated by the component that controls the brain’s internal environment after acute spinal cord injury showed limited efficacy. This is also due to the lack of a therapeutic approach that can selectively act on microglial and astrocytic cells.

The nanovectors developed by Politecnico di Milano, called nanogels, consist of polymers that can bind to specific target molecules. In this case, the nanogels were designed to bind to , which are crucial in the inflammatory response following acute spinal cord injury. The collaboration between Istituto di Ricerche Farmacologiche Mario Negri IRCCS and Politecnico di Milano showed that nanogels, loaded with a drug with anti-inflammatory action (rolipram), were able to convert glial cells from a damaging to a protective state, actively contributing to the recovery of injured tissue.

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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.

Continue reading “Effect of exercise for depression: systematic review and network meta-analysis of randomised controlled trials” | >

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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