Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: neuroscience – Page 699

· 24 mins ·

Safety was the reason the WHO stopped clinical trials of a drug that is not even an amphetamine. This happened before the racial divide, distraction, and mass confusion.

So let US think with a clear head. If Hydroxychloroquine is unsafe because of heart concerns, why give children amphetamines for ADHD, when marijuana and other natural measures offer many more safer alternatives? I know of them, why don’t the WHO and FDA, who know more than I do know as well? I can start a w… See More.

First-line stimulant class medications, such as methylphenidate and amphetamine formulations are FDA approved for the treatment of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and narcolepsy. It is estimated that 4.4% of US adults experience some symptoms and disabilities of ADHD. However adults receive 32% of all issued stimulant prescriptions.1 Off-label treatment for conditions including weight management, fatigue related to depression, stroke, traumatic brain injury, or hyper-somnolence due to Obstructive Sleep Apnea (OSA) may account for the high prevalence of stimulant use in adults. Such conditions are frequently associated with history or risk of cardiovascular disease. Of note, OSA and other forms of sleep-disordered breathing have unfavorable effects on cardiovascular physiology, predisposing affected individuals to cardiovascular disease and cardiac arrhythmias.2,3

Continue reading “The Safety of Stimulant Medication Use in Cardiovascular and Arrhythmia Patients” | >

Paleontologists at St Petersburg University created the most detailed virtual 3D-model of the endocranial cast and blood vessels of the head of an ankylosaurian.

Paleontologists from St Petersburg University have been the first to study in detail the structure of the brain and blood vessels in the skull of the ankylosaur Bissektipelta archibaldi. It was a herbivorous dinosaur somewhat similar in appearance to a modern armadillo. The first three-dimensional computer reconstruction of a dinosaur endocast made in Russia — a digital cast of its braincase — was of help to the scientists. It made it possible to find out that ankylosaurs, and Bissektipelta in particular, were capable of cooling their brains, had an extremely developed sense of smell, and heard low-frequency sounds. However, their brain was one and a half times smaller than that of modern animals of the same size.

Ankylosaurs appeared on Earth in the middle of the Jurassic — about 160 million years ago — and existed until the end of the dinosaur era, which ended 65 million years ago. These herbivorous animals were somewhat reminiscent of modern turtles or armadillos, were covered with thick armor, and sometimes even had a bony club on the tail. The researchers became interested in the uniquely-preserved remains of ankylosaurs from Uzbekistan. Although these fossils have been known for 20 years, only now have the scientists had a unique opportunity to study the specimens from the inside using cutting-edge methods.

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When Plato set out to define what made a human a human, he settled on two primary characteristics: We do not have feathers, and we are bipedal (walking upright on two legs). Plato’s characterization may not encompass all of what identifies a human, but his reduction of an object to its fundamental characteristics provides an example of a technique known as principal component analysis.

Now, Caltech researchers have combined tools from machine learning and neuroscience to discover that the brain uses a mathematical system to organize visual objects according to their principal components. The work shows that the brain contains a two-dimensional map of cells representing different objects. The location of each cell in this map is determined by the principal components (or features) of its preferred objects; for example, cells that respond to round, curvy objects like faces and apples are grouped together, while cells that respond to spiky objects like helicopters or chairs form another group.

The research was conducted in the laboratory of Doris Tsao (BS ‘96), professor of biology, director of the Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Center for Systems Neuroscience and holder of its leadership chair, and Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. A paper describing the study appears in the journal Nature on June 3.

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Chronic stress has long been associated with the pathogenesis of psychological disorders such as depression and anxiety. Recent studies have found chronic stress can cause neuroinflammation: activation of the resident immune cells in the brain, microglia, to produce inflammatory cytokines. Numerous studies have implicated the inflammatory cytokine, interleukin-1 (IL-1), a master regulator of immune cell recruitment and activity in the brain, as the key mediator of psychopathology. However, how IL-1 disrupts neural circuits to cause behavioral and emotional problems seen in psychological disorders has not been determined.

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The research team previously detailed how psychosocial stress results in peripheral immune activation, increased levels of circulating monocytes, and robust neuroimmunological responses in the brain. These responses include increases in IL-1 and other inflammatory cytokines, activation of brain glial cells and movements of peripheral immune cells to the brain, along with enhanced activity of specific neuronal pathways. The work makes it clear that inflammatory-related effects of stress are not just global effects, but are associated with increased IL-1 signaling within specific brain circuits.

The study shows for the first time that neuronal IL-1Rs in the hippocampus, a brain structure connected to learning and memory, is necessary and sufficient to mediate some of the behavioral deficits caused by chronic stress, pointing to a critical neuroimmune mechanism for the etiology of these types of disorders. Findings from the study augment the understanding of IL-1R signaling in physiological and behavioral responses to stress and also suggest that it may be possible to develop better medications to treat the consequences of chronic stress by limiting inflammatory signaling not just generally, which may not be beneficial in the long run, but to specific brain circuits.

“We created and validated a unique genetic mouse model to restrict IL-1R1 expression to different cell types to visualize and control IL-1Rs,” said Ning Quan, Ph.D., lead author, a professor of biomedical science in FAU’s Schmidt College of Medicine, and a member of the FAU Brain Institute (I-BRAIN). “We demonstrated that chronic social stress caused the mice to show social withdrawal and working memory deficits. These changes could be prevented if the neuronal IL-1R1 was deleted and restored if IL-1R1 was only allowed to be expressed on hippocampal neurons.”

Continue reading “Chronic stress? Limiting inflammatory signaling to specific brain circuits” | >

Summary: Certain personality traits could increase the risk of developing mild cognitive impairment, a new study reports. Openness was associated with a 6% reduced risk of developing a pre-dementia condition, while those who scored higher for neuroticism had a 6% increased risk of MCI.

Source: Wiley

A study published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society examined five personality traits–neuroticism, extraversion, conscientiousness, agreeableness, and openness–and their links to pre-dementia conditions called motoric cognitive risk (MCR) and mild cognitive impairment (MCI) syndromes.

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Summary: Researchers report the same subset of neurons encode actual and illusory flow motion, supporting the concept Jan Purkinje proposed 150 years ago, that “illusions contain visual truth”.

Source: SfN.

A study of humans and monkeys published in Journal of Neuroscience has found the same subset of neurons encode actual and illusory complex flow motion. This finding supports, at the level of single neurons, what the Czech scientist Jan Purkinje surmised 150 years ago: “Illusions contain visual truth.”

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