For decades, multiple sclerosis research has focused on myelin, the insulation around the brain’s wiring. Scientists paid less attention to another loss that was happening in parallel: neurons in the cortex, the seat of higher thinking and cognition, were quietly dying. A team led by UC San Francisco, University of Cambridge, and Cedars-Sinai Medical Center … Read more
Persons under stress may have a harder time spatially orienting themselves. Researchers in Bochum have discovered why. The stress hormone cortisol disrupts the brain’s navigational system. It impairs the function of the grid cells that play a crucial role in orientation. This has been verified by researchers from Ruhr University Bochum, Germany, in an imaging … Read more
Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and frontotemporal dementia (FTD) belong to a spectrum of neurodegenerative diseases with overlapping symptoms, characterized by muscle wasting, paralysis, dementia, and other serious impairments. There are currently no effective treatments. Many patients have a common hallmark: A protein called TDP-43 clumps together in the neurons of the brain to form tiny … Read more
Increasing our level of physical fitness leads to a bigger release of brain-boosting proteins following one session of exercise, a new study led by a UCL researcher has found. The study, published in Brain Research, took a group of inactive unfit participants through a 12-week training programme of cycling three times per week and made … Read more
Researchers have discovered that mutations in the FOXJ3 gene act as a “master switch” failure, disrupting how the brain builds its layers and leading to FCD, a primary cause of drug-resistant epilepsy. The study reveals how FOXJ3 controls the formation of brain cortical layers during brain development by regulating the PTEN–mTOR signaling pathway. The PTEN-mTOR … Read more
Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI)Â researchers have used a form of artificial intelligence (AI) to analyze anatomical changes in the brain and predict Alzheimer’s disease with nearly 93% accuracy. Their research, published in the journal Neuroscience, also revealed that the anatomical changes, involving loss of brain volume, differ by age and sex. Early diagnosis of Alzheimer’s … Read more
People with chronic back pain process everyday sounds differently, and more intensely, than people without pain, according to new research from the University of Colorado Anschutz. Published today in Annals of Neurology, the study is one of the first to tie this sound hypersensitivity to specific, measurable changes in the brain, indicating that chronic back … Read more
Sacramento, J., Bengio, Y., Costa, R. P. & Senn, W. Dendritic cortical microcircuits approximate the backpropagation algorithm. In Proc. 32nd International Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (eds Bengio, S. & Wallach, H. M.) 8735–8746 (ACM, 2018). Payeur, A., Guerguiev, J., Zenke, F., Richards, B. A. & Naud, R. Burst-dependent synaptic plasticity can coordinate learning … Read more
Age-related memory decline and neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s are often thought of as irreversible. But the brain is not static; neurons continually adjust the strength of their connections, a property called “synaptic plasticity”, and this flexibility is the basis of memory and learning. But aging and Alzheimer’s disrupt many cell processes that support synaptic plasticity. … Read more
Neuropathic pain, caused by injury or disease of the somatosensory nervous system, is a major clinical… The post Electroacupuncture: Anxiety & Pain Relief – Neural Effects appeared first on Archynetys. Source link