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Testing blood levels of a protein that brain cells leak when faulty or dying detected people with Alzheimer’s disease years before their symptoms emerged.

(CNN) — Intensive lowering of blood pressure, to a less than 120 mm Hg level, can have a measurable impact on mild cognitive impairment (MCI) — a well-established precursor of dementia, a new study finds.

Previous studies have suggested high blood pressure could be a risk factor for dementia and mild cognitive impairment, leading US researchers to explore whether lowering pressure could reduce this risk in a large randomized trial on more than 9000 people.

Lowering blood pressure did not significantly reduce dementia risk, but the secondary results showed a significant reduction in MCI, according to the study published Monday.

Continue reading “Lowering blood pressure could cut risk factor for dementia” »

The gut microbiome is made up of billions of bacteria, and scientists have been trying to understand exactly how they affect our health, contribute to our risk of contacting diseases and how they interact with the vital organs and systems in the body, including the brain. It is quite a lot to unpick.

As countries industrialise, their air becomes dirtier – and this could have some far-reaching effects on the beneficial bacteria inside us.

Monitoring their sleeping patterns, researchers identified an increase in the duration and continuity of REM sleep and specific brain oscillations characteristic of REM sleep, whereas ‘deep’ sleep, or non-REM sleep, did not change. The changes in REM sleep were very tightly linked to deficiency in the regulation of the stress hormone corticosterone. Mild stress also caused changes in gene expression in the brain.

The first and most distinct consequence of daily mild stress is an increase in rapid-eye-movement (REM) sleep, a new study in the journal PNAS reports. The research also demonstrated that this increase is associated with genes involved in cell death and survival.

REM sleep, also known as paradoxical sleep, is the sleep state during which we have most of our dreams and is involved in the regulation of emotions and memory consolidation. REM sleep disturbances are common in mood disorders, such as depression. However, little was known about how sleep changes are linked to molecular changes in the brain.

Continue reading “Stress and dream sleep are linked to pathways of brain cell death and survival” »

Multiple Sclerosis: A Misguided Immune Attack On Myelin : Shots — Health News It’s looking like MS strikes when a variety of triggers gang up to impair neurons in the brain and spinal cord. Researchers are using their new knowledge to search for treatments.

Decoder, developed in collaboration with a games developer, gets users to assume the role of an intelligence officer tasked with breaking up global criminal gangs (users are able to select a character and their backstory).

To meet the objective, users have to identify different combinations of number strings in missions littered with distraction.

Winning each mission means users unlock letters of the next criminal location (the higher the score, the more letters revealed).

Continue reading “Cambridge University releases a brain-training app that improves concentration akin to Ritalin” »

Paralyzed individuals can now operate tablets using brain waves.

The adult brain has learned to calculate an image of its environment from sensory information. If the input signals change, however, even the adult brain is able to adapt − and, ideally, to return to its original activity patterns once the perturbation has ceased. Scientists at the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology in Martinsried have now shown in mice that this ability is due to the properties of individual neurons. Their findings demonstrate that individual cells adjust strongly to changes in the environment but after the environment returns to its original state it is again the individual neurons which reassume their initial response properties. This could explain why despite substantial plasticity the perception in the adult brain is rather stable and why the brain does not have to continuously relearn everything.

Everything we know about our environment is based on calculations in our brain. Whereas a child’s brain first has to learn the rules that govern the environment, the adult brain knows what to expect and, for the most part, processes environmental stimuli in a stable manner. Yet even the adult brain is able to respond to changes, to form new memories and to learn. Research in recent years has shown that changes to the connections between neurons form the basis of this plasticity. But, how can the brain continually change its connections and learn new things without jeopardizing its stable representation of the environment? Neurobiologists in the Department of Tobias Bonhoeffer in Martinsried have now addressed this fundamental question and looked at the interplay between plasticity and stability.

The scientists studied the stability of the processing of sensations in the visual cortex of the mouse. It has been known for about 50 years that when one eye is temporarily closed, the region of the brain responsive to that eye increasingly becomes responsive to signals from the other eye that is still open. This insight has been important to optimize the use of eye patches in children with a squint. “Thanks to new genetically encoded indicators, it has recently become possible to observe reliably the activity of individual neurons over long periods of time,” says Tobias Rose, the lead author of the study. “With a few additional improvements, we were able to show for the first time what happens in the brain on the single-cell level when such environmental changes occur.”

Continue reading “Stable Perception in the Adult Brain” »

From the article:

In recent years, a growing number of scientific studies have backed an alarming hypothesis: Alzheimer’s disease isn’t just a disease, it’s an infection.

While the exact mechanisms of this infection are something researchers are still trying to isolate, a litany of papers argue the deadly spread of Alzheimer’s goes way beyond what we used to think.

Continue reading “The Cause of Alzheimer’s Could Be Coming From Inside Your Mouth, Study Claims” »