Massaging key parts of the brain with a pulsating magnetic field can do wonders for some living with chronic depression. For others, it falls well short of promising a life without a debilitating mood disorder.
The overwhelmingly positive results of an unblinded experiment on a small group of volunteers suggests some tweaks to the protocol might improve the odds of it working for people who have failed to find a solution elsewhere.
Researchers from Stanford and Palo Alto University in the US have shown in an open study on 21 people that administering five times the overall dosage of pulses across a higher number of daily sessions not only seems safe, but could achieve much better results.
An ongoing long-term trial suggests high levels of amyloid proteins in the brain do serve as an early sign of Alzheimer’s disease before cognitive decline becomes apparent.
A new study presenting the first data from a long-running US government trial is suggesting high levels of amyloid proteins in the brains of cognitively normal older adults can be an effective presymptomatic sign of early stage Alzheimer’s disease.
Over the last few decades, the amyloid hypothesis has guided the majority of research into an Alzheimer’s disease treatment. The idea is that a build up of toxic amyloid proteins in the brain, called plaques, is the primary degenerative driver behind the disease.
Researchers at Lund University in Sweden have succeeded in restoring mobility and sensation of touch in stroke-afflicted rats by reprogramming human skin cells to become nerve cells, which were then transplanted into the rats’ brains. The study has now been published in the research journal PNAS.
“Six months after the transplantation, we could see how the new cells had repaired the damage that a stroke had caused in the rats’ brains,” says Professor Zaal Kokaia, who together with senior professor Olle Lindvall and researcher Sara Palma-Tortosa at the Division of Neurology is behind the study.
Several previous studies from the Lund team and others have shown that it is possible to transplant nerve cells derived from human stem cells or from reprogrammed cells into brains of rats afflicted by stroke. However, it was not known whether the transplanted cells can form connections correctly in the rat brain in a way that restores normal movement and feeling.
A new form of magnetic brain stimulation rapidly relieved symptoms of severe depression in 90% of participants in a small study conducted by researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine.
The researchers are conducting a larger, double-blinded trial in which half the participants are receiving fake treatment. The researchers are optimistic the second trial will prove to be similarly effective in treating people whose condition hasn’t improved with medication, talk therapy or other forms of electromagnetic stimulation.
The treatment is called Stanford Accelerated Intelligent Neuromodulation Therapy, or SAINT. It is a form of transcranial magnetic stimulation, which is approved by the Food and Drug Administration for treatment of depression. The researchers reported that the therapy improves on current FDA-approved protocols by increasing the number of magnetic pulses, speeding up the pace of the treatment and targeting the pulses according to each individual’s neurocircuitry.
The brain is steadily engaged in thought. These internal communications are also usually bombarded with external sensory events. Hence, the impact of the two neuronal processes need to be permanently fine-tuned to avoid their imbalance. A team of scientists at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB) has now revealed the role of the neurotransmitter serotonin in this mechanism. They discovered that distinct serotonergic receptor types control the gain of both streams of information in a separable manner. Their findings may facilitate new concepts of diagnosis and therapies for neuronal disorders related to malfunction of the serotonin system. The study is published online in the open access journal eLife on 7 April 2020.
Impacting on different streams of information in the brain
Dr. Dirk Jancke, head of the Optical Imaging Group at the Institute of Neural Computation, says, “Imagine sitting with your family at dinner, and a heated debate is going on about how to properly organize some internal affairs. Suddenly, the phone starts ringing; you are picking up while family discussion goes on. In order to understand the calling party correctly, the crowd in the back must speak lower or the caller needs to speak up. Thus, the loudness of each internal background conversation and external call need to be properly adjusted to ensure non-interfered, separable information transfer.” As in this anecdote, comparable brain processes involve serotonin.
Advanced stages of dementia typically follow a series of muted symptoms patients might mistake for less serious conditions, like stress or sleep deprivation. In fact, according to a new study conducted by researchers from Duke University, many of us evidence one of the premiere red flags associated with the illness almost every day.
“There has been a misperception that financial difficulty may occur only in the late stages of dementia, but this can happen early, and the changes can be subtle,” explained senior author P. Murali Doraiswamy, MBBS, a professor of psychiatry and geriatrics at Duke University, in a media release.
The new paper, published in The Journal of Prevention of Alzheimer’s Disease, examines the cross-sectional relationship between dementia and financial management skills in the elderly. The strength of the report’s findings highlights how limited the diagnostic scope has been up until very recently.
New research provides evidence that the active ingredient in so-called magic mushrooms can affect brain processes related to emotional functioning long after the substance has left one’s body. The findings, published in Scientific Reports, shed new light on the long-term effects of psilocybin.
Rather than examining the brain while it’s under the influence of psilocybin, the researchers from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine were interested in the enduring impact of the substance.
“Nearly all psychedelic imaging studies have been conducted during acute effects of psychedelic drugs. While acute effects of psychedelics on the brain are of course incredibly interesting, the enduring effects of psychedelic drugs on brain function have great untapped value in helping us to understand more about the brain, affect, and the treatment of psychiatric disorders,” said Frederick S. Barrett (@FredBarrettPhD), an assistant professor and the corresponding author of the study.
That vision may have come a step closer after researchers at the University of California, San Francisco demonstrated that they could translate brain signals into complete sentences with error rates as low as three percent, which is below the threshold for professional speech transcription.
While we’ve been able to decode parts of speech from brain signals for around a decade, so far most of the solutions have been a long way from consistently translating intelligible sentences. Last year, researchers used a novel approach that achieved some of the best results so far by using brain signals to animate a simulated vocal tract, but only 70 percent of the words were intelligible.
The key to the improved performance achieved by the authors of the new paper in Nature Neuroscience was their realization that there were strong parallels between translating brain signals to text and machine translation between languages using neural networks, which is now highly accurate for many languages.
Research involving bowhead whales has suggested that it may one day be possible to extend the human lifespan to 200 years.
From the demigods of Greek mythology to the superheroes of 20th century comic books, we’ve been intrigued by the idea of human enhancement for quite a while, but we’ve also worried about negative consequences. Both in the Greek myths and modern comics and television, each enhanced human has been flawed in some way.
In the area of lifespan enhancement, for instance, Tithonus, though granted eternal life, shrunk and shriveled into a grasshopper, because his immortal girlfriend Eos, forgot to ask Zeus to give him eternal youth. Achilles, while super strong and agile, had a weak spot at the back of his heal, and Superman would lose his power if exposed to “kryptonite”. As for Khan’s people, their physical superiority, both physical and mental, made them overly ambitious, causing a third world war that nearly destroyed humanity in the Star Trek backstory.
Using genetic modification, nanotechnology, bionics, reconstructive surgery, hormones, drugs or any combination of these approaches, real-life human enhancement is looking ever more achievable. As with the fictional examples, the idea of enhancement being a double-edged sword will surely remain part of the discussion. At the same time, though, because enhancement means mastering and manipulating human physiology and the basis of consciousness and self-awareness, the road to enhancement will be paved with advances beneficial to the sick and the disabled. This point must be at center stage when we weigh the pluses and minuses in various enhancement categories, especially physical capability, mental function, and lifespan.
This episode of Debt Nation is sponsored by Thrivous, the human enhancement company (https://thrivous.com). Thrivous develops and distributes advanced nootropic and geroprotector dietary supplements, to enhance cognition and promote healthy aging. Each nutrient and each dose is based on multiple human studies. And all quality control is completely open source.
