Lifeboat Foundation

A ‘pacemaker’ for the brain is on the horizon to prevent people with Parkinson’s and epilepsy suffering from seizures and tremors.

The device is made up of two tiny array of electrodes which sit inside the skull, and link to a circuit board on the side of the head.

The ‘pacemaker’ records the normal electrical current of the brain continually and if it notices a change of rhythm immediately fires a stimulating charge to coax the pulse back to normal.

Continue reading “Brain ‘pacemaker’ could prevent tremors and seizures for Parkinson’s and epilepsy sufferers” »

For several decades now, one of the buzz words in the medical field has been ‘stem cell’. It has been said to aid in treating illnesses like multiple sclerosis, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, Alzheimer’s disease, and heart diseases.

For the past three years, researchers at the Hubrecht Institute in the Netherlands have been painstakingly cataloging and mapping all the proliferating cells found in mouse hearts, looking for cardiac stem cells. The elusive cells should theoretically be able to repair damaged heart muscle, so the stakes in finding them have been high.

This week, however, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences is scheduled to announce the results of the Hubrecht team’s work: no evidence of cardiac stem cells at all.

Continue reading “A Closer Look At What A Stem Cell Is: Our Cells’ Diverse Regenerative Capabilities” »

An injection capable of halting the progress of Alzheimer’s could be available to patients within a decade, Britain’s leading dementia organisation predicts.

The Alzheimer’s Society says a series of recent breakthroughs in treatments that disrupt harmful genes has brought scientists to a “tipping point” in their fight against the disease.

For decades, researchers have sought without success a treatment for Alzheimer’s based on targeting damaging proteins that build up in the brain.

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Researchers have explored how memory is tied to the hippocampus, with findings that will expand scientists’ understanding of how memory works and ideally aid in detection, prevention, and treatment of memory disorders.

Anxiety disorders are severe mental disorders in which patients suffer from intense fears and anxiety or from sudden, inexplicable panic attacks. In extreme cases, the affected individuals barely leave their homes, which can have serious consequences for their relationships with family and friends as well as for their professional lives. Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Experimental Medicine in Göttingen have now identified a synaptic protein which, when inactivated, has an anxiolytic effect in mice.

Around 10 percent of the population suffer from anxiety disorders, and current treatment options only offer effective help for a proportion of those affected. One of the changes observed in the brains of patients with anxiety disorders is an increased neuronal activity in the amygdala, a brain region that plays a key role in processing emotions such as anxiety or fear. An overactivation of the amygdala is thought to be involved in causing exaggerated anxiety. Many anxiolytic medications such as benzodiazepines presumably normalize this overactivation by strengthening the function of inhibitory synapses.

Synapses are connections between nerve cells in the brain, at which information is transmitted from one nerve cell to another. At inhibitory synapses, this transmission results in a reduction in the activity of the neighbouring nerve cells. In the amygdala, for instance, this inhibits the transmission of stimuli that trigger fear and anxiety. Benzodiazepines strengthen this inhibitory effect—but unfortunately they affect not only those inhibitory synapses that transmit anxiogenic stimuli but also many other inhibitory synapses in the brain. This can lead to significant side effects such as pronounced sedation and impaired concentration. Accordingly, scientists are searching for new, more specific targets for anxiolytic medications.

Continue reading “Synaptic protein regulates anxiety behaviour” »

BEIJING, Dec. 28 (Xinhua) — A Chinese research group has identified a gene variant that plays a key role in the development of Alzheimer’s disease in Han Chinese, the largest ethnic group in China.

The study was recently published by the National Science Review, an English journal affiliated with the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS).

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is an irreversible, progressive brain disorder that slowly destroys memory, thinking skills and the ability to carry out simple tasks. The disease affects about 48 million people worldwide, and the number is expected to increase with the aging population. There is no effective cure.

Physics grappled with the question of whether space is absolute or relative for centuries, before deciding in favor of relativity. But, it is only in recent years that the brain sciences have begun to discuss a parallel set of questions. For many years now, absolute space has ruled neuroscience. In the visual system, for example, it has long been assumed that there are two channels of information flow.4 The first is the “what” channel, carrying information about the identity of objects that an animal sees. The second is the “where” channel, containing information about the absolute position of these objects. It was believed that the “what” channel contained no positional information at all. However, recent work has shown that while no information about the absolute position of an object is present in this channel, there is relative position information.5,6 This relative positional information is likely to be very important for object recognition.

The first pieces of the brain’s “inner GPS” started coming to light in 1970. In the laboratories of University College London, John O’Keefe and his student Jonathan Dostrovsky recorded the electrical activity of neurons in the hippocampus of freely moving rats. They found a group of neurons that increased their activity only when a rat found itself in a particular location. They called them “place cells.”

Building on these early findings, O’Keefe and his colleague Lynn Nadel proposed that the hippocampus contains an invariant representation of space that does not depend on mood or desire. They called this representation the “cognitive map.” In their view, all of the brain’s place cells together represent the entirety of an animal’s environment, and whichever place cell is active indicates its current location. In other words, the hippocampus is like a GPS. It tells you where you are on a map and that map remains the same whether you are hungry and looking for food or sleepy and looking for a bed. O’Keefe and Nadel suggested that the absolute position represented in the hippocampal place cells provides a mental framework that can be used by an animal to find its way in any situation—be that to find food or a bed.

Continue reading “The Surprising Relativism of the Brain’s GPS” »

An Engineer Jostles Living Brains To Learn How Hits To The Head Cause Injuries : Shots — Health News A question about heading soccer balls inspired a series of experiments to understand how the brain changes shape when someone’s head takes a hit.

Why do many problems in life seem to stubbornly stick around, no matter how hard people work to fix them? It turns out that a quirk in the way human brains process information means that when something becomes rare, we sometimes see it in more places than ever.

Think of a “neighborhood watch” made up of volunteers who call the police when they see anything suspicious. Imagine a new volunteer who joins the watch to help lower crime in the area. When they first start volunteering, they raise the alarm when they see signs of serious crimes, like assault or burglary.

Let’s assume these efforts help and, over time, assaults and burglaries become rarer in the neighborhood. What would the volunteer do next? One possibility is that they would relax and stop calling the police. After all, the serious crimes they used to worry about are a thing of the past.

Continue reading “Your Brain Is Constantly Searching for Problems to Fix” »