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Category: neuroscience – Page 753

In neurological diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease or Multiple Sclerosis, brain neurons are constantly being lost, resulting in memory lapses, speech disorders, mood swings and movement disorders, for example, as well as muscle tremors in the case of Parkinson’s. After six years of development, MedUni Vienna researchers from the Department of Neurology (Head: Thomas Berger), led by Roland Beisteiner, have developed a new method of treatment that represents a world first. Using a non-invasive ultrasound technique, it is now possible to reach all areas of the brain and activate neurons that can help to regenerate brain functions. The preliminary data, which have been prominently published on the international stage, show that this can improve brain performance. This has positioned Vienna as a world leader in an important sector of medicine.

The new method is called transcranial pulse stimulation with ultrasound (TPS) and was developed in collaboration with Swiss commercial partner Storz Medical and its project leader, Ernst Marlinghaus. “For the first time in the world, TPS enables us to penetrate into all areas of the brain by means of an ultrasound pulse delivered directly to the skull in a non-invasive, painless procedure, during which the patient is fully conscious, and to specifically target particular areas of the brain and stimulate them,” explains Beisteiner. The study was part of the inter-university cluster led by Roland Beisteiner and Tecumseh Fitch, which is attempting to improve patients’ brain functions by means of brain stimulation and is being jointly run by MedUni Vienna and the University of Vienna. Such clinical procedures must be carried out with great precision and must be tailored to the individual patient. However, the existing electromagnetic techniques such as e.g.

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The insulin pumps diabetics currently rely on do a great job of delivering the hormone as needed, but need regular replacing due to what are known as fibrils. These form over a day or two as insulin compounds accumulate into clumps and create the risk of blockages, but scientists in Australia have engineered what they say is a safer alternative, with egg yolks serving as their starting point.

The formation of fibrils means that diabetics need to replace their insulin pumps every 24 to 72 hours to avoid the risk of dangerous blockages, which bring with them a risk of life-threatening under-dosing. Beyond the dangers to the patient’s well-being, the need to regularly replace the pump increases the workload needed to manage their disease and means that portions of the medicine often go to waste.

So, there is considerable interest in developing synthetic insulin that doesn’t behave in this way. Researchers at Melbourne’s Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health approached this problem through a new technique it developed with scientists in Japan, whereby the insulin is engineered from egg yolks to allow for greater freedom over the final design.

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Scientists have discovered that when an essential key protein needed to generate novel brain cells during pregnancy and early childhood days of the offspring is missing, which makes the brain goes haywire. This particular deprivation causes an imbalance in brain’s circuitry can lead to long-term cognitive and movement behaviours characteristic of autism spectrum disorder.” During brain development, there is a coordinated series of events that have to occur at the right time and the right place in order to establish the appropriate number of cells with the right connections,” said Juan Pablo Zanin, Rutgers-Newark research associate, and lead author.” Each of these steps is carefully regulated and if any of these steps are not regulated correctly, this can impact behaviour.

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What the reasons underlying these impairments are is yet unclear but scientists at the Center for Regenerative Therapies of TU Dresden (CRTD) wanted to investigate if increasing the number of stem cells in the brain would help in recovering cognitive functions, such as learning and memory, that are lost during ageing.”

https://tu-dresden.de/tu-dresden/newsportal/news/verjuengung…en-maeusen

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Continue reading “We all will experience it at some point, unfortunately: The older we get the more our brains will find it difficult to learn and remember new things” | >

Scientists at Rutgers University-Newark have discovered that when a key protein needed to generate new brain cells during prenatal and early childhood development is missing, part of the brain goes haywire—causing an imbalance in its circuitry that can lead to long-term cognitive and movement behaviors characteristic of autism spectrum disorder.

“During , there is a coordinated series of events that have to occur at the right time and the right place in order to establish the appropriate number of cells with the right connections,” said Juan Pablo Zanin, Rutgers-Newark research associate and lead author on a paper published in the Journal of Neuroscience.” Each of these steps is carefully regulated and if any of these steps are not regulated correctly, this can impact behavior.”

Zanin has been working with Wilma Friedman, professor of cellular neurobiology in the Department of Biological Sciences, studying the p75NTR —needed to regulate —to determine its exact function in brain development, gain a better understanding of how this genetic mutation could cause to die off and discover whether there is a genetic link to autism or like Alzheimer’s.

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Johns Hopkins researchers report that a type of biodegradable, lab-engineered nanoparticle they fashioned can successfully deliver a “suicide gene” to pediatric brain tumor cells implanted in the brains of mice. The poly(beta-amino ester) nanoparticles, known as PBAEs, were part of a treatment that also used a drug to kill the cells and prolong the test animals’ survival.

In their study, described in a report published January 2020 in the journal Nanomedicine: Nanotechnology, Biology and Medicine, the researchers caution that for safety and biological reasons, it is unlikely that the herpes simplex virus type I thymidine kinase (HSVtk)—which makes tumor cells more sensitive to the lethal effects of the anti-viral drug ganciclovir—could be the exact therapy used to treat human medulloblastoma and atypical teratoid/rhabdoid tumors (AT/RT) in children.

So-called “suicide ” have been studied and used in cancer treatments for more than 25 years. The HSVtk gene makes an enzyme that helps restore the function of natural tumor suppression.

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A new unique signal discovered within the brain might be what makes us human:

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/367/6473/83

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A special developmental program in the human brain drives the disproportionate thickening of cortical layer 2/3. This suggests that the expansion of layer 2/3, along with its numerous neurons and their large dendrites, may contribute to what makes us human. Gidon et al. thus investigated the dendritic physiology of layer 2/3 pyramidal neurons in slices taken from surgically resected brain tissue in epilepsy patients. Dual somatodendritic recordings revealed previously unknown classes of action potentials in the dendrites of these neurons, which make their activity far more complex than has been previously thought. These action potentials allow single neurons to solve two long-standing computational problems in neuroscience that were considered to require multilayer neural networks.

Continue reading “Dendritic action potentials and computation in human layer 2/3 cortical neurons” | >