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- Hacker News
- ... in male mice.
I think savvy universities want PIs who are savvy enough to realize that the point of these is to boost measurable visibility like citation count and h-index, so the headline of a news release boosting the article doesn't matter. They can always blame a copy editor for the headlines. It could read "world peace solved with moon juice." The provost would only care if it generated negative feedback. So it's the PR department's job to juice it as much as possible without getting blowback.
by 0xWTF - Isn’t that where all drugs start out? But yea the headline doesnt tell the full story
- Grey matter in the prefrontal increasing μg measurement with age.
- Could this treatment also help with other neurodegenerative diseases?by nose
- Do we consider strokes to be neurodegenerative? I would have expected them to be considered acute.by erikerikson
- How do they test this on mice? Do they trigger brain seizures in them?by nubg
- Many different techniques for different types of stroke:
We can block certain arteries mechanically by inserting a tool, inject photosensitive agent then cause a targeted clot with a laser, inject clotting agent, choke, inject blood vessel dissolving agent and re-inject its own blood.
I understand why we research this but I just could not do it.
by Traubenfuchs - > “The goal is to have a medicine that stroke patients can take that produces the effects of rehabilitation,” said Dr. S. Thomas Carmichael, the study’s lead author and professor and chair of UCLA Neurology. “Rehabilitation after stroke is limited in its actual effects because most patients cannot sustain the rehab intensity needed for stroke recovery.
Sounds truly amazing, I have known two people who had severe strokes - one's PT was contingent on triaging resources to whoever was likely to recover more, another simply hated PT and speech therapy and often refused to participate or do the exercises. Even if it didn't help recovery a medicine like this would have reduced the stress of everyone involved.
by benoau - So my question does it work with Alzheimer's.?by xbmcuser
- My understanding was that psychedelics have proven to be effective at opening up a “critical period” where a brain can rewire itself like when in childhood. Wonder if this is related.
https://academic.oup.com/brain/article/148/6/1862/8052899?gu...
by hank2000 - It is this compound https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39106304/by kleton
- DDL-920, which apparently looks like this: https://www.probechem.com/userfiles/product/PC-22875.gif
"DDL-920 is a potent, selective and brain permeable negative allosteric modulator (NAM) of the γ-aminobutyric acid type A receptors (GABARs), inhibits parvalbumin (PV) expressing interneurons (PV+INs) and consequently enhances γ-oscillations both in vitro and in vivo."
by elevaet - > This type of neuron helps generate a brain rhythm, termed a gamma oscillation, which links neurons together so that they form coordinated networks to produce a behavior, such as movement. Stroke causes the brain to lose gamma oscillations. Successful physical rehabilitation in both laboratory mice and humans brought gamma oscillations back into the brain and, in the mouse model, repaired the lost connections of parvalbumin neurons.
>Carmichael and the team then identified two candidate drugs that might produce gamma oscillations after stroke. These drugs specifically work to excite parvalbumin neurons.
Asking while being total layperson here - can we generate those gamma oscillations by an [may be implanted] electronic device?
Edit: and google search to help, judging by the dates seems to be a pretty fresh field :
https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/jou...
"... by pairing robotic rehabilitation with a clinical-like noninvasive 40 Hz transcranial Alternating Current Stimulation, we achieved similar motor improvements mediated by the effective restoring of movement-related gamma band power, improvement of PV-IN maladaptive network dynamics, and increased PV-IN connections in premotor cortex. "
It also sounds like getting an exoskeleton for such patients can be helpful not only to perform immediate tasks, it also can be a part of the restoring process.
by trhway - If you've read Ted Chiang's "Understand," you'll understand why this headline made my eyes pop out. For those who haven't, it's in the "Stories of Your Life and Others" collection, which includes the short story that the film Arrival was based on.
- Thanks for the hint. I'd always thought the movie was inspired by Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse 5. The premise was the same, and even the aliens looked somewhat similar. Vonnegut jokingly described them as an upside down toilet brush.by locallost
- I just read this a few months ago and it was my first thought as well! Like Flowers for Algernon taken to its extremes.by TheGRS
- I'm a big fan of Ted Chiang's "Understand" short story, but I think your way over hyping the study there: more neuron growth does not even generally translate to higher intelligence and can often introduce a variety of degenerative effects because pathways are not being grown a an organized systematic way through natural process of experience adaptation.by jadbox
- My understanding was that strokes caused brain cell death, and that there was no coming back from that, but my neurologists would speak of 'bruised' brain cells, and that after weeks or months or even years you can see recovered function. UCLA's work here is targeting this disconnection and the lost rhythm in the surviving, distant networks. However there is, as yet, NO concievable intervention that could recover function from cell death at that center of the infarct.by padolsey
- it is more like that the brain learns to use other regions or neurons to do the tasks of the dead brain cells. The brain cells that are dead due to ischemia are dead and will usually be collected by microglia and after some time there are defects in the brain where the ischemia was.by rasmus1610
- One wonders if someday we might be able to resurrect the neural network from dead cells by somehow reviving the connections between neurons. I imagine that the connections stay, but become dormant when the neuron dies.by foota
- There've been some interesting new developments in cell therapies over the last few years. Bemdaneprocel from BlueRock Therapeutics is now into Phase 3 trials for Parkinson's, for example. The essential idea is to implant some dopaminergic neuron precursors to grow new cells in place of cell death. Still a long way from the kind of general stroke treatment you're describing, but regenerative neuroscience is looking pretty promising.
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[1] https://www.bluerocktx.com/bluerock-therapeutics-announces-p...
by noleary - My understanding is that brain is composed of way more neurons than required, for resiliency. So if it gets a "bruise" in some part, when even a large portion of the cells are dead -- it can still function at 100%. Like a programmer without a finger. The problem is visible only when all the cells in some part are dead.
That's why crows, with their low brain mass are pretty clever (and why all arguments equating brain size and smartness are wrong).
Just my layman understanding.
by deepsun - There are people who are missing huge percentages of their brain from injury or other issues and lead a seemingly normal life.
https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/as-it-happens-thursday-...
by asdff - This talks about connections.
My understanding is that while brain cell death (outside of the hippocampus, at least) cannot regenerate, the connections and networks can.
But neurons regenerating connections between each other is, afaik, been pretty mainstream for awhile. The brain can't generate new cells, but it can rewire the connections between them, is what I understand. From reading the article, it seems to only claim rewiring connections, not regenerating cells.
There are a ton of upcoming drugs that help stimulating rewiring, for instance:
https://www.nia.nih.gov/news/new-drug-candidate-targeting-sy...
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8190578/
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/324410
etc.
by jmalicki