#Inflamed Brain Is depressed a Brain Researchers at the Centre for Addiction and Mental health (CAMH) in Toronto have found a possible link between inflammation in the brain and clinical depression.
Since more than half of patients suffering from major depression disorder (MDD) do not respond to antidepressant treatment,
a Marker of Neuroinflammation in the Brain During Major depressive episodes showed that there was a 30%increase in inflammation among patients experiencing a major clinical episode."
"This finding provides the most compelling evidence to date of brain inflammation during a major depressive episode,
but this is the first definitive evidence found in the brain.""Dr. Meyer and his team observed the activation of a specific immune cell of the brain called microglia,
which play a prominent role in the neural inflammatory response pathway. They conducted brain scans using positron emission tomography (PET),
which produces a three-dimensional image of functional process within the brain, on 20 patients diagnosed with depression and 20 healthy control subjects.
The results not only showed a significant elevation of inflammation in patients with depression, a trend was observed that the rates of inflammation were proportional to the level of depression,
It provides a potential new target to either reverse the brain inflammation or shift to a more positive repair role,
and the CAMH team believes that using anti-inflammatories as a treatment option needs to be explored further. his finding provides the most compelling evidence to date of brain inflammation,
#Placental Breach Mechanism for Listeria Revealed The host blood-brain and placental barriers act as critical ramparts to infections from microbial pathogens,
#Researchers Discover New ain Sensinggene An international scientific team led by the University of Cambridge reports the identification of a gene essential to the production of pain-sensing neurons in humans.
The team looked at nerve biopsies taken from the patients to see what had gone wrong and found that particular pain-sensing neurons were absent.
From these clinical features of the disease, the team predicted that there would be a block to the production of pain-sensing neurons during the development of the embryo.
As chromatin is particularly important during formation of particular neurons, this provides a possible explanation for why pain-sensing neurons do not form properly in the CIP patients.
RDM2 emerges as a key factor in the orchestration of sensory neurogenesis and may hold promise as a target for new pain therapeutics,
wrote the investigators.""The ability to sense pain is essential to our self-preservation, yet we understand far more about excessive pain than we do about lack of pain perception,
#New Hope for ALS Sufferers Researchers at the CHUM Research center and the University of Montreal report the discovery of a previously unknown link between the immune system and the death of motor neurons in Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou gehrig's disease.
The study (eurodegeneration in C. elegans models of ALS requires TIR-1/Sarm1 immune pathway activation in neurons
plays a critical role in the development of ALS. n imbalance of the immune system can contribute to the destruction of motor neurons
and trigger the disease, said Alex Parker, Ph d.,CHUM researcher and associate professor in the department of neuroscience at the University of Montreal.
Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis is a neuromuscular disease that attacks neurons and the spinal cord. Those affected gradually become paralyzed and typically die less than five years after the onset of symptoms.
that system triggers a misguided attack against the worm's own neurons. he worm thinks it has a viral or bacterial infection and launches an immune response.
and destroys the animal's motor neurons, Dr. Parker explained. Is the same scenario at work with people?
The human equivalent of the tir-1 genearm1as proved crucial to the nervous system's integrity.
#Scientists Discover Specific Brain Receptor Role in Cocaine addiction Scientists at the University at Buffalo have discovered a previously unknown neural pathway that can regulate changes made in the brain due to cocaine use, providing new
published in Nature Neuroscience.""There is a need to more fully understand the long-term molecular changes in the brain involved in drug craving and relapse."
"Dr. Gancarz, a former postdoctoral associate with the UB Research Institute on Addictions (RIA), worked on the study under the direction of senior author David Dietz, Ph d.,assistant professor in the department of pharmacology
The study focused, specifically, on Activin receptors in regions of the brain that are involved in pleasure and reward."
"There are changes in the brain caused by drug use that occur and persist, but are unmasked only after withdrawal from a drugn this case, cocaine,"notes Dr. Dietz."
"Cocaine use alters the connections between certain neurons through changes in the shape of the cells."
"The researchers discovered that the Activin pathway controls the ability of cocaine to induce this change in the neurons
#Scientists Smell Success for Treatment of Spinal cord Injuries Three years after they treated patients with spinal cord injury in a randomized clinical trial with transplanted cells from the patients'olfactory mucosa to build a bridge
to span the gap between the damaged ends of the spinal cord, scientists discovered that some recipients had experienced a range of modest improvements
and daily life activities, wrote the investigators in an article (utologous Olfactory Lamina Propria Transplantation for Chronic Spinal cord Injury:
randomized 12 patients with complete spinal cord injury (SCI) to receive OLP transplants and followed them for three years after transplantation,
noting that similar studies had not been designed to include long-term patient follow-up. he postoperative images in our study demonstrated that the transplants in the OLP group bridged the proximal and distal stumps (of the severed spinal cord),
'We believe that to derive clinical benefits from OEC transplants a combination with other pharmacological agents is most likely to achieve significant axon regeneration
and reestablish functionally useful connections across the injured spinal cord. h
#Scientists Devise Promising Strategy to Tackle MERS A Purdue University-led team of scientists studying the Middle east Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) reports that it found molecules that shut down the activity of an essential enzyme
an extremely difficult to treat form of brain cancer, though it isn't able to cross the brain-blood barrier very effectively.
The challenge for researchers in this scenario will be to find a way to allow the drug to cross this barrier, the body's natural protection for the brain,
which can make it difficult for drug treatments to reach their target. When SR9243 is used in combination with existing chemotherapy drugs,
The team reports that Lysine-Specific Demethylase 1 (LSD1) turns off genes required to maintain cancer stem cell properties in glioblastoma, a highly aggressive form of brain cancer.
epigenetic changes help make a liver cell different from a brain cell, "said Dr. Li, an assistant project scientist in Chen's lab."Our results indicate that the same programming processes determine
#Scientists turn blood into nerve cells in pursuit of better pain relief As it stands, there's not a whole lot we know about pain.
our nervous system comprising different kinds of cells running signals through complex piping around the body presents a difficult task for scientific research.
But a new study details a technique that turns blood cells into different nerve cells, promising to improve our understanding of why things itch or burn.
but demonstrates a method of converting somebody's blood sample into a variety of their nerve cells.
This includes both the central nervous system of the brain and spinal chord, along with the peripheral nervous system in the rest of the body.
The thinking is that this will allow unprecedented access to study a patient's specific neural system
and make the main cell types of neurological systems-the central nervous system and the peripheral nervous system-in a dish that is specialized for each patient,
"says Bhatia.""Nobody has done ever this with adult blood. Ever.""The patented technology could lead to new kinds of drugs that rather than create the perception of pain relief in the central nervous system,
actually target the neurons in the peripheral nervous system. The hope is that this could lessen the side effects of pain relief drugs."
"You don want to feel sleepy or unaware, you just want your pain to go away, "says Bhatia."
and required technology to actually test different drugs to find something that targets the peripheral nervous system and not the central nervous system in a patient specific, or personalized manner."
and physical characteristics of the fly and even prepare microdissections to analyze the brain. Associate professor of biology Mark Schnitzer and his team were even able to perform behavioral studies with the robot,
#Brain-zapping headwear designed to treat Parkinson's While the device has not yet been clinically trialled on humans,
deep brain stimulation. This involves a surgeon implanting electrical leads into the region of the brain that controls movement.
A pulse generator inserted under the skin below the collarbone provides electrical signals that create a lesion,
We asked if there was a way to provide the same treatment in a less invasive way that doesn't require brain surgery."
"From there, the students learned about an experimental clinical treatment called transcranial direct current stimulation, which involves low-level current being passed through electrodes on a patient's head.
Like deep brain stimulation, it affects electrical activity in specific areas of the brain, but it's cheap, safe,
and morphed into neuron-like cells. Shah and team say that structures made from their ink are flexible and strong enough to be sutured easily to existing tissues
#Implantable device hits targeted brain cells with light and drugs when triggered remotely The field of optogenetics where individual brains cells are made to behave differently
when exposed to light has wide-ranging potential. It may one day be used to reverse acquired blindness,
With one eye on this emerging area of neuroscience, scientists have developed a device the width of a human hair that can be planted in the brain to deliver light
and is made to be soft like brain tissue so as not to cause inflammation and neural damage.
It also houses four separate chambers for carrying drugs directly to the brain and cellular-scale inorganic light-emitting diode(-ILED) arrays, allowing it to shine light on targeted cells.
One part of the study saw the researchers deliver drugs only to one side the brain.
This enabled them to stimulate neurons responsible for movement, which prompted the mouse to begin moving in circles.
In another experiment, the scientists shone light directly onto specific brain cells. These cells were chosen because they expressed light-sensitive proteins that trigger the release of dopamine.
The resulting good feelings led the mice to return to the same point in the maze where they had received the treatment.
the researchers were able to negate this action by remotely releasing a drug that blocks the function of the dopamine neurotransmitter.
with application opportunities not only in the brain but in other parts of the nervous system and other organs as well,"says the study co-author John Rogers,
The wrist is flexible enough that its end can be steered to allow needles to reach inside the nose, throat, ears, urethra, and brain.
or face so that tumors can be removed from the pituitary gland and skull base. It can also be done through the nasal cavity with an endoscope (a thin tube with a camera attached),
#Noninvasive spinal cord stimulation gets paralyzed legs moving voluntarily again Five men with complete motor paralysis have regained the ability to move their legs voluntarily
and produce step-like movements after being treated with a noninvasive form of spinal cord stimulation. The new treatment builds on prior work to generate voluntary movements in paralyzed people through electrical stimulation in particular,
the other in 2014) that involved surgically implanting an electrode array on the spinal cord. This time,
This drug mimics the neurotransmitter serotonin and it is known to induce walking motions in mice with spinal cord injuries.
All five men had been paralyzed for more than two years prior to receiving the treatment, which lasted 45 minutes at a time
"It's as if we've reawakened some networks in the nervous system, "said co-lead researcher V. Reggie Edgerton.
There appear to be connections between the brain and spinal cord even in some paralyzed people,
The nerves send signals to the brain, and, miraculously, the prosthetic toes have touch. Wolfang Ranger, who lost his right leg in 2007,
#IARPA Seeks Partners in Brain-Inspired AI Initiative US intelligence officials have set in motion a five-year project to spark progress in machine learning by reverse-engineering the algorithms of the human brain.
is ultimately looking to facilitate the development of synthetic systems with brain-like performance and proficiency.
IARPA lays out its strategy for fostering multidisciplinary approaches at the intersection of data science and neuroscience that increase scientific understanding of the cortical computations underlying neural information processing.
the brain remains far better-suited for a host of detection and recognition tasks. The agency sees the emerging research area of neurally-inspired machine learning as crucial for closing the performance gap between software and wetware. espite significant progress in machine learning over the past few years,
the brain is able to robustly separate and categorize signals in the presence of significant noise and nonlinear transformations,
This performance gap between software and wetware persists despite some correspondence between the architecture of the leading machine learning algorithms and their biological counterparts in the brain,
if we can construct synthetic systems that not only resemble the high-level blueprints of the brain,
TA1 experimental design, theoretical neuroscience, computational neural modeling, machine learning, neurophysiological data collection, and data analysis; TA2 neuroanatomical data collection;
and learning rules employed by the brain to create ever more capable neurally-derived machine learning algorithms,
#Delivering drugs straight into the brain A team of Canadian scientists has found a way to inject the drugs directly into the brain,
thus keeping the brain clean. But this barrier also filters good things, such as disease fighting drugs from entering the nervous system.
It only allows a selected few types of molecules to cross including water, some gases and lipid soluble molecules.
and get the drugs to where they are needed most to the human brain. Currently, researchers say they have found a way based on the so-called ingle domain antibodiessda.
and making it believe they should be let through to the brain. The antibodies are able to squeeze past the barrier not just because of their size (these are fragments that consist of one molecule)
The single domain antibodies are exploiting the same mechanism that allows nutrients into the brain,
The method is part of the NRC Therapeutics Beyond Brain Barriers (TBBB) program which has been developing special carrier molecules for the past six years. t really opens the possibilities to use many different types of therapeutics for different diseases that we couldn really use before
unless we inject them directly into the brain which is highly invasive, r. Danica Stanimirovic,
Scientists add that it could become a significant step towards slowing the spread of brain diseases like Alzheimer, multiple sclerosis and Parkinson.
#Spoken sentences can be reconstructed from brain activity patterns It is now possible to reconstruct spoken sentences from activity patterns of the human brain surface. rain to Textcombines knowledge from neuroscience, medicine and informatics.
Speech is produced in the human cerebral cortex. Brain waves associated with speech processes can be recorded directly with electrodes located on the surface of the cortex.
It has now been shown for the first time that is possible to reconstruct basic units, words, and complete sentences of continuous speech from these brain waves and to generate the corresponding text.
Researchers at KIT and Wadsworth Center USA present their rain-to-Textsystem in the scientific journal Frontiers in Neuroscience. t has long been speculated
whether humans may communicate with machines via brain activity alone, says Tanja Schultz, who conducted the present study with her team at the Cognitive Systems Lab of KIT. s a major step in this direction,
our recent results indicate that both single units in terms of speech sounds as well as continuously spoken sentences can be recognized from brain activity. hese results were obtained by an interdisciplinary collaboration of researchers of informatics, neuroscience, and medicine.
In Karlsruhe, the methods for signal processing and automatic speech recognition have been developed and applied. n addition to the decoding of speech from brain activity
our models allow for a detailed analysis of the brain areas involved in speech processes and their interaction, outline Christian Herff und Dominic Heger,
who developed the Brain-to-Text system within their doctoral studies. The present work is the first that decodes continuously spoken speech
and transforms it into a textual representation. For this purpose, cortical information is combined with linguistic knowledge
Currently, Brain-to-Text is based on audible speech. However, the results are an important first step for recognizing speech from thought alone.
The brain activity was recorded in the USA from 7 epileptic patients who participated voluntarily in the study during their clinical treatments.
An electrode array was placed on the surface of the cerebral cortex (electrocorticography (ECOG)) for their neurological treatment.
Later on, the researchers in Karlsruhe analyzed the data to develop Brain-to-Text. In addition to basic science and a better understanding of the highly complex speech processes in the brain,
Brain-to-Text might be a building block to develop a means of speech communication for locked-in patients in the future.
Article and image credit via Neuroscience New t
#lectric Highwayfor EVS in Nevada The Nevada Electric Highway, recently unveiled by Gov. Brian Sandoval
and NV Energy, is a network of charging stations planned along U s. Route 95 that would finally make it far easier to drive sparsely populated, mostly desert route between Reno and Las vegas with an electric vehicle.
#Scientists grow human mini-brains that are giving big insights into autism Scientists first grew mini-hearts in a lab. Then they 3d printed skin.
self-organizing, crazy-looking nuggets of living yes, LIVING brain. These erebral organoidsare the brainchild of Dr. Madeline Lancaster, a neuroscientist at Cambridge who is interested in how our brains develop as embryos.
A few years back while working as a postdoc in Vienna at the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology (IMBA
Lancaster noticed off-hand that her cultured brain cells weren sticking to the bottom of the dish as usual instead,
Lancaster tinkered around with growth conditions until her mini-brains expanded several millimeters wide tiny compared to a normal human brain,
The pale, opaque chunks of brain matter didn look like much on the surface, but their intricate internal architecture blew Lancaster away.
Under the microscope, the brain blobs were doppelgangers of 9-week-old fetus brains. They contained neural stem cells that busily churned on
making precursor cells that developed into fully functional neurons capable of firing away. As the blobs grew,
the tissue self-organized into distinct subregions populated by different types of neurons in fact, Lancaster and her team could identify regions in the organoids that roughly looked like a hippocampus, forebrain and even retina.
The outer ortexof the organoid stratified into rudimentary layers, in a way eerily similar to how our own cerebral cortex matures.
Brain organoids became an instant hit. Despite their gnarled look, the brain blobs are far more umanthan any animal brain could ever be
making them valuable models for studying human brain development. Plus, unlike actual fetus brains, they can be experimented on.
In a study published last week in Cell, a team from Yale School of medicine used the technique to glean insight into why autism occurs in some people without a clear genetic cause.
The team selected four autistic patients with enlarged heads (a condition that affects roughly one-fifth of people with the disorder), cultured organoids from their skin cells,
and compared them to those grown from the patientsnon-autistic fathers. Within a month, it was apparent that organoids created from people with autism overproduced one type of neuron that acts to dampen the chatter of normal neural activity.
This small change upset the delicate excitatory and inhibitory balance in the developing brain, and may in part cause the faulty wiring behind autism behavioral symptoms.
Further sleuthing led the scientists to a single gene responsible for the glitch. Before mini-brains, scientists had to shift through gobs of genomic data to fish out gene variants associated with autism.
But so far, not a single gene (or even a group of them) can explain the disorder in all its forms and complexities.
The scientists were trying to take the long-winding road from genetics to biology, which proved to be tedious and difficult.
Brain organoids represent a paradigm shift. Scientists can now directly study the biology of complex neurological disorders and from there
Although similar, mouse brains don exactly follow the same developmental trajectory as human brains, so we don know how well the findings translate.
Unlike human embryonic stem cells, brain organoids come from skin samples taken from patients with explicit consent.
the overall structure of the brain blobs is screwed pretty up. Like facial features on a Picasso portrait,
Theye also hoping to coax mini-brains into a later developmental stage by providing external blood supply.
With each advance forward, the mini-brain complexity and applications grow. As of now, the organoids most certainly can hink without external output and mature neural networks to support information processing,
their neural activity is nothing more than meaningless cacophony. In time however, scientists may be able to grow organoids that resemble a complete human brain.
What happens then? Besides the convenience of a great model, wrote Dr. Arnold Kriegstein, a stem cell researcher at the University of California, San francisco, in an article accompanying Lancaster publication,
and put them into nerve cells to transform them so that they can receive light. As well as helping blind people see,
the new field has given also insight into how the brain works. It can even be used to alter memories.
Instead it focuses on the ganglion cells behind them, which usually work to take the information between the rods and cells and the brain.
But the scientists hope that they can rewire those cells so that they become light-sensitive, by inserting the right molecules and shining light at them.
scientists could make an internet of human brains Scientists have attached successfully together the brains of monkeys
By linking the brains together, scientists suggest that they could create Brainets a system of brains attached together to make an rganic computer The experiments found that the successfully connected animals brains were at least as good as one single one,
and often better, and so could be the beginning of more research on connected animal brains. ssentially,
we created a super-brain, Miguel Nicolelis, the study lead author, told The Guardian. The successful tests show that it could be possible to do the same thing with human brains.
That could mean that the idea that we can never escape our own selves and brains is wrong letting us attach ourselves together
and become more clever in the process. In the monkey experiment, the three animals were attached together using special sensors that were implanted in their brain
and could transmit activity. The three of them successfully learnt to control a virtual avatar on a screen,
working together to move its arm. In the rat one scientists plugged in four different rats to a machine that could capture
and transmit their brain signals. They then successfully did challenges, including recognising patterns and storing information.
The equipment used in the experiments could be used to do the same thing for human brains.""This is the first demonstration of a shared brain-machine interface,
a paradigm that has been translated successfully over the past decades from studies in animals all the way to clinical applications,
Modeled after the human brain, a memprocessor processes and stores information within the same units by means of their mutual interactions.
The reason for this computational power stems from properties inspired by the brain and shared by any universal memcomputing machine
#Exoskeleton Helps Spinal cord Injury Patient Walk LAS VEGAS Bionic exoskeletons are helping spinal cord injury and stroke patients walk again.
One man with a partial spinal cord injury, Shane Mosko, demonstrated here today (Jan 8) at the 2015 CES how the new bionic legs operate,
More than 3, 500 patients with either spinal cord or stroke injuries have walked more than 15 million steps with the device,
Bionic Legs Help Spinal cord Patient Walk Superhuman? Since the 1890s, inventors have imagined and sometimes patented Ironman-like suits that could give a wearer superhuman strength.
"because it helps retrain the brain pathways that control walking, Angold said. The new exoskeleton can also help people with spinal cord injuries, like Mosko,
who uses a wheelchair but has partial sensation and some use of his legs. The technique can allow them to build
#'Pop-up'3d Structures Can Mimic Brain Circuits By mimicking children's pop-up books, scientists can now make complex microscopic 3d shapes that model brain circuitry and blood vessels,
researchers say. These intricate structures, which could resemble tiny flowers and peacocks, may one day help scientists electronically control living tissue, the researchers added.
examples include the circuits of brain cells and networks of veins. Materials scientist John Rogers, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign,
"Our focus has been on the brain, heart and skin, "Rogers said. Devices that mimic the complex structures found in nature are very difficult to manufacture on microscopic scales.
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