Smoking cessation drug shows potential to treat Parkinson s disease in females
Texas A&M University College of Medicine ressearchers have recently discovered that cytisine a smoking cessation drug commonly used in Europe reduces the loss of dopamine neurons in females. These findings provide potential evidence for the use of the drug to treat Parkinson s disease or stop its progression in women.
Sara Zarate and Gauri Pandey, graduate students from the lab of Rahul Srinivasan, assistant professor in the Department of Neuroscience & Experimental Therapeutics, are co-first authors of the research. Their findings are published in the
Journal of Neurochemistry.
Scientists seek to enhance artificial intelligence by integrating brain cells
With a new grant from the U.S. Army, a team of scientists will seek to enhance artificial intelligence by integrating brain cells called astrocytes.
By encoding a feature of biological intelligence called reinforcement learning, in which we iteratively learn from successes and failures, deep neural networks (DNNs) have revolutionized artificial intelligence with spectacular demonstrations of mastery in Chess and Go.
But they struggle to deal with the real-world problems encountered daily by humans and other animals. A new collaboration based at MIT posits that a fundamental shortcoming of deep neural networks is that they are merely neural.
In recent years, researchers have begun using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) not just for better understanding the neural bases of psychiatric illness, but also for experimental treatment of depression, ADHD, anxiety, PTSD, substance use disorder, and schizophrenia with a technique called real-time fMRI neurofeedback.
Discovery offers a precise route to treat inflammation associated with neuropathic pain
One of the hallmarks of chronic pain is inflammation, and scientists at the UNC School of Medicine have discovered that anti-inflammatory cells called MRC1
+ macrophages are dysfunctional in an animal model of neuropathic pain. Returning these cells to their normal state could offer a route to treating debilitating pain caused by nerve damage or a malfunctioning nervous system.
The researchers, who published their work in
Neuron, found that stimulating the expression of an anti-inflammatory protein called CD163 reduced signs of neuroinflammation in the spinal cord of mice with neuropathic pain.
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IMAGE: Hirofumi Morishita, MD, PhD, Associate Professor of Psychiatry, Neuroscience and Opthalmology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and lead author of the study. view more
Credit: Mount Sinai Health System
Mount Sinai Researchers find a new way to prevent attention deficits associated with Fragile X, a leading genetic cause of autism, in an animal model
Corresponding Author: Hirofumi Morishita, MD, PhD, Department of Psychiatry, Neuroscience, Friedman Brain Institute, Mindich Child Health and Development Institute, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York.
Bottom Line: The adolescent maturation of the frontal cortex is important for establishing cognitive function, and disruption of this process is associated with neurodevelopmental disorders. This study uncovered a new molecular driver of frontal circuit maturation that is essential for cognitive function, and demonstrated, in an animal model, that this mechanism can be targeted to