Credit: Phil Jones, freelance photographer
A tiny population of neurons known to be important to appetite appear to also have a significant role in depression that results from unpredictable, chronic stress, scientists say.
These AgRP neurons reside exclusively in the bottom portion of the hypothalamus called the arcuate nucleus, or ARC, and are known to be important to energy homeostasis in the body as well prompting us to pick up a fork when we are hungry and see food.
Now Medical College of Georgia scientists and their colleagues report the first evidence that, not short-term stress, like a series of tough college exams, rather chronic, unpredictable stress like that which erupts in our personal and professional lives, induces changes in the function of AgRP neurons that may contribute to depression, they write.
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IMAGE: Neanderthal-ized brain organoids (left) look very different than modern human brain organoids (right) they have a distinctly different shape, and differ in the way their cells proliferate and how. view more
Credit: UC San Diego Health Sciences
As a professor of pediatrics and cellular and molecular medicine at University of California San Diego School of Medicine, Alysson R. Muotri, PhD, has long studied how the brain develops and what goes wrong in neurological disorders. For almost as long, he has also been curious about the evolution of the human brain what changed that makes us so different from preceding Neanderthals and Denisovans, our closest evolutionary relatives, now extinct?
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IMAGE: Timeline of some of the key events establishing anticipation as a genuine biological phenomenon and somatic expansion as contributing toward Huntington s disease pathology. view more
Credit: : Darren G. Monckton in The Contribution of Somatic Expansion of the CAG Repeat to Symptomatic Development in Huntington s Disease: A Historical Perspective, Journal of Huntington s Disease 10:1 (February 2021)..
Amsterdam, February 11, 2021 - Recent genetic data from patients with Huntington s disease (HD) show that DNA repair is an important factor that determines how early or late the disease occurs in individuals who carry the expanded CAG repeat in the
HTT gene that causes HD. The processes of DNA repair further expand the CAG repeats in
Scientists have made a vital step towards understanding the origins of Parkinson s Disease - the fastest growing neurological condition in the world.
A study published in
Neurons are the primary cells of the nervous system, and the signals that are transmitted between them are responsible for all our actions and our cognitive ability.