Posts Tagged Parkinson’s disease
[WEB SITE] First-ever neuroscience conference to explore ultra-personal approach to brain health
Posted by Kostas Pantremenos in REHABILITATION on October 18, 2016
For three days this week, Roanoke, Virginia, is the capital of the precision neuroscience world.
The first-ever scientific meeting to explore an ultra-personal approach to brain health — the Virginia-Nordic Precision Neuroscience Conference — opened this week at the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute.
“The promise, hope, and opportunity for precision neuroscience is great — with the potential for realizing the brain and mind’s full potential, preventing disorders, and restoring brain health after injury or degenerative disease,” said Virginia Tech President Tim Sands, who welcomed about 200 scientists on behalf of Virginia Tech and Carilion Clinic. “It is also the responsibility of the scientific and medical communities to help define the real possibilities, differentiate hype from reality, and help focus the scientific enterprise and resource allocation on areas where the promise can be realized.”
More than 1,000 disorders of the brain and nervous system result in more hospitalizations than any other disease group, including heart disease and cancer.
“By understanding an individual’s genetics, behavior, education, habits, life experiences such as physical and psychological trauma — all the things that make people who they are — the neuroscientific community may be able to develop individually tailored plans for people to optimize education, health care, diet, exercise, and environments where they are likely to thrive cognitively, socially, and physically,” said Michael J. Friedlander, Virginia Tech’s vice president for health sciences and technology and the founding executive director of the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute.
The collaboration grew from an idea developed by Friedlander and Tor S. Haugstad, a neurologist and neuroscience chair at Sunnaas National Rehabilitation Hospital in Oslo, Norway, worked to develop as the Norway/U.S. Neuroscience Collaboration, initially called NUNC. The effort has grown to include multiple universities in Norway as well as in several other Nordic countries, and universities and foundations throughout Virginia.
People respond to brain injuries differently, which is one of the motivations for further development of the precision neuroscience field.
“We may get two people in our department with very similar brain injuries, and one may be rendered with a low level of consciousness while the other can recover and return home to his family and work life,” said Haugstad, who also chairs the traumatic brain rehabilitation program at Sunnaas National Rehabilitation Hospital. “We need to discover at cellular and molecular levels why people respond so differently, and tailor treatment and rehabilitation to the specific person.”
The meeting, which will continue through Friday, is the first to bring the top minds of precision neuroscience from across the globe together in a think-tank setting to explore the challenges and promise of bringing personalized medicine to brain health and brain disorders.
“One individual’s experience with Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, a traumatic brain injury, or various other neurological or psychiatric disorders will not be exactly like anyone else’s,” Friedlander said.
“From a business and health care point of view, clinical trials may fail because they target generic diseases that manifest very differently in different people,” Friedlander said. “If a drug or treatment doesn’t work in 75 percent of the people, it is considered a failure — but it worked in 25 percent. Should we forget about the 25 percent of people it helped and scrap potentially lifesaving therapies that may have cost hundreds of millions of dollars during a decade of development?”
By targeting groups of patients based on their predicted manifestations of a particular brain disorder, the success rate for finding new treatments will improve and the investment risk can be lessened, according to Friedlander.
“Essentially the pharmaceutical industry and investors de-risk their investments by having more precise, targeted therapies and tests that are more likely to be successful,” Friedlander said. “The treatment may be effective for 10 percent of people with a particular brain disease, but we can learn a lot about why those 10 percent may have benefitted based on their genetic composition and expression patterns and their life experiences. Then, we get back to work on a treatment for the next 10 percent, and the next 10 percent. It may not be one size fits all.”
Researchers will discuss innovations ranging from a Nobel prize-winning imaging system that visualizes the action of molecules within the brain, to the work of physician-scientists who are on the frontlines of health care delivery for brain injury, neurodegenerative diseases of aging, and brain developmental disorders.
In many ways, the conference has special meaning for the partner cities in Virginia and in Europe, Haugstad said.
“Roanoke is a city with a history of rail that, through innovation and spirit, is reinventing itself, and it is leading the way in precision neuroscience,” Haugstad said. “In Norway, a country that depends on oil revenue, the cities are changing much like cities in Virginia, by finding new ways to live and move forward. Together, we are very good partners.”
Source: First-ever neuroscience conference to explore ultra-personal approach to brain health
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[REVIEW] The therapeutic potential of cannabinoids for movement disorders – Full Text HTML/PDF
Posted by Kostas Pantremenos in Pharmacological on November 27, 2015
ABSTRACT
There is growing interest in the therapeutic potential of marijuana (cannabis) and cannabinoid-based chemicals within the medical community and, particularly, for neurological conditions. This interest is driven both by changes in the legal status of cannabis in many areas and increasing research into the roles of endocannabinoids within the central nervous system and their potential as symptomatic and/or neuroprotective therapies. We review basic science as well as preclinical and clinical studies on the therapeutic potential of cannabinoids specifically as it relates to movement disorders. The pharmacology of cannabis is complex, with over 60 neuroactive chemicals identified to date. The endocannabinoid system modulates neurotransmission involved in motor function, particularly within the basal ganglia. Preclinical research in animal models of several movement disorders have shown variable evidence for symptomatic benefits, but more consistently suggest potential neuroprotective effects in several animal models of Parkinson’s (PD) and Huntington’s disease (HD). Clinical observations and clinical trials of cannabinoid-based therapies suggests a possible benefit of cannabinoids for tics and probably no benefit for tremor in multiple sclerosis or dyskinesias or motor symptoms in PD. Data are insufficient to draw conclusions regarding HD, dystonia, or ataxia and nonexistent for myoclonus or RLS. Despite the widespread publicity about the medical benefits of cannabinoids, further preclinical and clinical research is needed to better characterize the pharmacological, physiological, and therapeutic effects of this class of drugs in movement disorders.
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[WEB SITE] New technology discovered for brain repair: Chemical transformation of human glial cells into neurons
Posted by Kostas Pantremenos in Neuroplasticity on October 22, 2015
For the first time, researchers have used a cocktail of small molecules to transform human brain cells, called astroglial cells, into functioning neurons for brain repair. The new technology opens the door to the future development of drugs that patients could take as pills to regenerate neurons and to restore brain functions lost after traumatic injuries, stroke, or diseases such as Alzheimer’s. Previous research, such as conventional stem cell therapy, requires brain surgery and therefore is much more invasive and prone to immune-system rejection and other problems. The research, led by Gong Chen, Professor of Biology and the Verne M. Willaman Chair in Life Sciences at Penn State University, will be published online in the journal Cell Stem Cell on Oct. 15th, 2015.
“We have discovered a cocktail of small molecules that can reprogram human brain astroglial cells into neuron-like cells after eight-to-ten days of chemical treatment,” Chen said. The neurons the researchers reprogrammed survived for more than five months in cell culture, where they formed functional synaptic networks. The scientists also injected the reprogrammed human neurons into the brains of living mice, where they integrated into the neural circuits and survived there for at least one month.
Astroglial cells before treatment with small-molecule cocktails in the lab of Gong Chen at Penn State University Credit: Gong Chen lab, Penn State University
Astroglial cells before treatment with small-molecule cocktails in the lab of Gong Chen at Penn State UniversityCredit: Gong Chen lab, Penn State University”The small molecules are not only easy to synthesize and package into drug pills, but also much more convenient for use by patients than other methods now being developed,” Chen said. Before the promise of the new technology results in pills at a pharmacy, the new research effort must first succeed through much development and testing in the laboratory and then through a series of clinical trials.
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[WEB SITE] How healthy is your brain? Stand on one leg to find out
Posted by Kostas Pantremenos in Uncategorized on March 31, 2015
Here’s something you should do for your health: stand on one leg.
Can you do it for at least 20 seconds? If so, your brain’s probably in pretty good shape.
Japanese researchers have found this simple test is an excellent way to determine whether someone has cerebral small-vessel disease (SVD), reports Prevention magazine. SVD can be a factor in strokes, dementia and Parkinson’s disease. “Cerebral small vessel disease is a frequent finding on CT and MRI scans of elderly people and is related to vascular risk factors and cognitive and motor impairment, ultimately leading to dementia or Parkinsonism in some,” wrote an unrelated 2011 study published in BMC Neurology.
The Kyoto University study, published last December in the journal Stroke, observed some 1,400 men and women with an average age of 67 attempt to stand with one leg raised and eyes open. All of the participants later had MRI scans done of their brains.
Almost without exception, the study participants who had trouble maintaining balance on one leg had SVD; some of them had brain lesions or other brain disorders.
Those who successfully balanced on one leg generally had brains without any signs of disease. They also scored higher on other, more traditional mental tests.
via How healthy is your brain? Stand on one leg to find out | OregonLive.com.
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[WEB SITE] tDCS – A Therapy For The Future? – Brain Blogger
Posted by Kostas Pantremenos in Cognitive Rehabilitation, Epilepsy, tDCS/rTMS on March 5, 2015
Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) is a non-invasive, painless brain stimulation method which uses electrical currents to modulate neuronal activity in specific parts of the brain. A constant, low intensity current is delivered through small electrodes attached to the scalp in order to either increase or reduce neuronal activity.
This is clearly a trending topic: although interest in tDCS dates back to the 1960s, a search in PubMed reveals that more than half of the articles on tDCS were published in the last two years.
Despite numerous studies on different applications for tDCS, its use is still not generally accepted in the clinical setting; tDCS is not an FDA-approved therapy, remaining mostly an experimental method. Although tDCS has been tested on numerous conditions such as depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, chronic pain, fibromyalgia, and stroke, its efficacy is still largely inconclusive.
Many studies applying tDCS have already been published in 2015, as well as a few reviews analyzing its efficacy for different conditions. By gathering the available information for the application of tDSC in a specific context, reviews are particularly useful, allowing researchers to sort through all the conflicting data. And these have actually shown some promising applications for tDSC.
Learning and Memory
There have been claims that tDCS can enhance cognition in healthy adult populations, especially working memory and language production, spiking the interest in tDCS as a neuroenhancement tool.
tDCS seems to act as a neuromodulatory technique, inducing a long-term enhancement or reduction of signal transmission between neurons. By strengthening or weakening neuronal connections, it may facilitate learning and memory formation, as well as neural plasticity that contributes to functional recovery after stroke, for example.
However, a review on the effects of a single-session of tDCS showed that it did not have a significant effect on a variety of cognitive function such as language, episodic memory, working memory or mental arithmetic, just to name a few. Nevertheless, it did not exclude the possibility that tDCS may be effective after multiple sessions.
There are in fact many reports from studies in healthy subjects stating that tDCS enhances verbal performance and learning, improving such outcomes as verbal speed, fluency, and amount of verbal learning. These language enhancement outcomes could potentially be quite useful in treating language deficits associated with different pathological conditions. In fact, tDCS has been used to enhance treatment efficacy in post-stroke aphasia rehabilitation and the results seem promising, with tDCS being effective in increasing language skills despite a high variety of stimulation parameters and patient characteristics.
Language enhancement can also be applied to a word reading context. Repeated tDCS application to adults with developmental dyslexia has been shown to significantly improve reading speed and fluency.
Reports supporting a positive effect on memory enhancement can also be found. Different studies have demonstrated an improvement in working memory and episodic memory in healthy subjects, with an increase in accuracy and in response time. But again, the evidences are still considered insufficient for a clinical application.
These memory enhancement effects could be quite useful in both Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease, and in post-stroke rehabilitation. Again, some promising outcomes in these pathologies have been reported, but there are still conflicting results.
Continue–> tDCS – A Therapy For The Future? | Brain Blogger.
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