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Category: neuroscience – Page 265

Neurodegenerative diseases are among the most complex human ailments, and their exact causes and mechanisms are the subject of ongoing research and debate. When it comes to Huntington’s disease, steadily accumulating evidence over the past 30 years has led to a model of molecular events that explains several key features of the disease, including why it has an earlier onset in some people and why it causes symptoms such as involuntary movements and mood swings.

But two new complementary papers from The Rockefeller University suggest that this may not be the whole story.

Huntington’s is caused by somatic CAG expansions in which a triplet repeat of DNA bases in a mutated Huntingtin (mHTT) gene increase in number throughout life, leading to . As described in Nature Genetics and in Neuron, the Rockefeller scientists used a custom technique to reveal that these genetic repeats are unstable, and likely producing more toxic proteins, only in select brain . Moreover, some cells they studied proved surprisingly resilient to CAG repeat expansion.

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Feb 20 (Reuters) — The first human patient implanted with a brain-chip from Neuralink appears to have fully recovered and is able to control a computer mouse using their thoughts, the startup’s founder Elon Musk said late on Monday.

“Progress is good, and the patient seems to have made a full recovery, with no ill effects that we are aware of. Patient is able to move a mouse around the screen by just thinking,” Musk said in a Spaces event on social media platform X.

Musk said Neuralink was now trying to get as many mouse button clicks as possible from the patient.

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Lung cancer is the deadliest of cancers. Screening could save thousands of lives, so why is it not the norm?

https://econ.st/2VAzFNX

Lung cancer kills more people than any other form of tumour.
About nine out of ten people die within five years of being diagnosed with the disease. If the cancer is caught very early most patients could be cured. But doctors struggle to diagnose early because there are no symptoms until the cancer is in its late stages and has spread to other organs.

Some experts think that doctors should screen people at high risk to find lung cancer before symptoms appear. The national lung-screening trial in America subjected 53,000 current and former heavy smokers to either X-ray or computed-tomography scans every year for three years. Its results, reported in 2011 found that screening with CT scans did save lives.

But there was a problem. Too many of the lumps found during the screening were not cancer. This is known as a false positive. False positives can harm patients who undergo dangerous follow-up procedures such as biopsies, even if they do not have cancer.

It can also affect their mental health and false positives add to the cost of health care. According to new data from the World Health Organisation these harms can be greatly reduced by following a different protocol. Instead of treating all lumps as a positive result doctors are now advised to ignore the smallest nodules and treat them as a negative result. This has halved the rate of false positives.

Continue reading “How to detect the deadliest form of cancer” | >

New research from the University of Sussex holds promise for extending life expectancy and enhancing treatment options for a common and aggressive brain cancer affecting thousands in the UK annually and hundreds of thousands globally.

Published in the Journal of Advanced Science, the study revealed that the protein PANK4, previously overlooked, can hinder cancer cells’ response to chemotherapy in glioblastoma, an aggressive form of brain cancer and if the protein is removed, cancer cells respond better to the main chemotherapy drug used globally for the treatment of glioblastoma.

Glioblastoma stands as one of the most aggressive types of brain cancer, with approximately 3,200 adults diagnosed annually in the UK and around 250,000 to 300,000 cases globally. Despite treatment with surgery, radiation, and the chemotherapy drug temozolomide, which initially yields positive responses, patients typically face a bleak prognosis, with a survival rate of just one to 18 months post-diagnosis due to the rapid development of resistance in cancer cells.

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Macquarie University neuroscientists have developed a single-dose genetic medicine that has been proven to halt the progression of both motor neuron disease (MND) and frontotemporal dementia (FTD) in mice—and may even offer the potential to reverse some of the effects of the fatal diseases.

It may also hold opportunities for treating more common forms of dementia, such as Alzheimer’s disease, which is the second most common cause of death in Australia after heart disease.

The new treatment, dubbed CTx1000, targets pathological build-ups of the protein TDP-43 in cells in the brain and spinal cord.

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Neurologic immune-related adverse events (nirAEs) following immune checkpoint inhibitor therapy for cancer are frequent and varied; a recent study identified risk factors for death after nirAEs.

Recent cohort studies have demonstrated that neurologic immune-related adverse events (nirAEs) following immune checkpoint inhibitor (ICI) therapy for cancer are frequent, varied, and associated with higher overall survival (NEJM JW Neurol Sep 29 2023 and Neurology 2023; 101:e2472). Researchers conducted a retrospective cohort study of consecutive patients referred to a tertiary center during a 5-year period to characterize the clinical features of nirAEs and identify predictors of ICI response and survival.

The researchers identified 64 patients with confirmed nirAEs, 81% involving the central nervous system (CNS). The vast majority of CNS nirAE patients had encephalopathy, of which 73% were neither seropositive for well-characterized neural autoantibodies, nor had a distinctive encephalitis syndrome, nor had evidence of CNS inflammatory changes. The most common peripheral nervous system (PNS) syndrome was myasthenia and myositis (with or without myocarditis) overlap syndrome. Only 17% of PNS nirAE patients were seropositive. Steroids were given to 91% of nirAE patients after a median of 90 days of symptoms, and 48% received additional immunotherapy. At 1-month follow-up, 72% of nirAE patients showed improvement, 9% had worsened, and 17% had died. Among the 53 patients who survived the first month, median follow-up was 6 months; during follow-up, 30% died, most commonly of cancer progression or cancer-related complications. Death was associated with lung cancer (hazard ratio, 2.

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What is happening in the cerebral cortex when someone hears a melody?

Music has been central to human cultures for tens of thousands of years, but how our brains perceive it has long been shrouded in mystery.

Now, researchers at UC San Francisco have developed a precise map of what is happening in the when someone hears a .

It turns out to be doing two things at once: following the pitch of a note, using two sets of neurons that also follow the pitch of , and trying to predict what notes will come next, using a set of neurons that are specific to .

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Research reveals potential of using low-intensity focused ultrasound for pain management. Scientists have found soundwaves from low-intensity focused ultrasound aimed at a place deep in the brain called the insula can reduce both the perception of pain and other effects of pain, such as heart rate changes.

You feel a pain, so you pop a couple of ibuprofen or acetaminophen. If the pain is severe or chronic, you might be prescribed something stronger — an opioid pain killer that can be addictive under some circumstances.

But what if you could ease pain by non-invasively manipulating a spot inside your brain where pain is registered?

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For patients with acute ischemic stroke and large cores, endovascular thrombectomy (EVT) improves clinical outcomes compared with medical management (MM), according to a study published online Feb. 7 in the Journal of the American Medical Association to coincide with the annual American Stroke Association International Stroke Conference, which was held from Feb. 7 to 9 in Phoenix.

Amrou Sarraj, M.D., from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, and colleagues describe the relationship between imaging estimates of irreversibly injured brain and at-risk regions and and EVT treatment effect in an exploratory analysis of the SELECT2 trial.

Adults with due to occlusion of the internal carotid or (M1 segment) and large ischemic core were randomly allocated to EVT versus MM across 31 global centers; the analysis included 336 patients.

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