Neuroscience

The widely held belief that depression is due to low levels of serotonin in the brain and that raising those levels is an effective treatment is invalid, according to David Healy, Professor of Psychiatry at the Hergest psychiatric unit in North Wales. Instead it is "the marketing of a myth." The serotonin reuptake inhibiting (SSRI) group of drugs came on stream in the late 1980s, nearly two decades after first being mooted, writes Healy.  The delay centered on finding an indication.  After concerns emerged about tranquillizer dependence in the early 1980s, drug companies marketed…

In a small study, Johns Hopkins researchers found that DNA from the sperm of men whose children had early signs of autism shows distinct patterns of regulatory tags that could contribute to the condition.   Autism spectrum disorder (autism) affects one in 68 children in the U.S. Although studies have identified some culprit genes, most cases remain unexplained. But most experts agree that autism is usually inherited, since the condition tends to run in families. In this study, investigators looked for possible causes for the condition not in genes themselves, but in the "epigenetic tags…

An international study has identified significant vascular changes in the brains of people with Huntington's disease. This breakthrough, the details of which are published in the most recent issue of Annals of Neurology, will have significant implications for our understanding of the disease and could open the door to new therapeutic targets for treating this fatal neurodegenerative condition. Huntington's disease (HD) is a hereditary neurodegenerative disorder that causes serious motor, cognitive, and psychiatric dysfunction and gradually leads to loss of autonomy and death. The disease…

Half of all patients who survive a cardiac arrest experience problems with cognitive functions such as memory and attention, according to new research from Lund University. A control group comprising heart attack patients had largely the same level of problems, which suggests that it is not only the cardiac arrest and the consequent lack of oxygen to the brain that is the cause of the patients’ difficulties. The work involved 950 cardiac arrest patients in Europe and Australia. Six months after the cardiac arrest, half of the patients had died, and the survivors were followed up with…

Neuroscientists say the brain hormone oxytocin acts on individual brain cells to prompt specific social behaviors.  Until now, oxytocin - the "love" hormone - has been linked to sexual attraction and things like regulating breast feeding and promoting maternal-infant bonding, but its precise effect in social behaviors is not known. In experiments in mice, researchers mapped oxytocin to unique receptor cells in the left side of the brain's cortex. They found that the hormone controls the volume of "social information" processed by individual neurons, curbing so-called excitatory or…

Breast cancer patients often display mild cognitive defects even before chemotherapy and doctors are attributing that to a kind of preemptive post-traumatic stress disorder induced by diagnosis of the disease. Studies have shown that cancer patients often exhibit mild attention deficit and some decrease in memory and other basic cognitive functions. The phenomenon has generally been attributed to putative side-effects of chemotherapeutic drugs on the brain, and the condition is therefore popularly referred to as chemobrain - but more recent investigations have detected symptoms of chemobrain…

As a society we believe that our political allegiance depends on which party best marries up with our needs and values – and that these are shaped by our life experiences. But research with twins suggests picking who to vote for in an election might have more to do with your genes than the policies of the parties. At the Department of Twin Research, which hosts TwinsUK, the biggest adult twin registry in the UK, we recently performed a poll of voting preferences. The twins were all born in the UK and were broadly representative of the UK population. The aim was to explore how much nature…

Researchers have discovered how nerve cells adjust to low energy environments during the brain's growth process, which may one day help find treatments for nerve cell damage and neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases. Neurons in the brain have extraordinarily high energy demands due to complex dendrites that expand to high volume and surface areas. It is also known that neurons are the first to die from restriction of blood supply to tissues, causing a shortage of oxygen and glucose needed for cellular metabolism. Little was known, however, on how cells…

Some animals communicate via pheromones and so it has often been wondered if humans might have a similar innate ability. An answer may come via cell biology rather than neuroscience.   Pheromones are substances that facilitate chemical communication between members of the same species. They trigger a homogenous, repeatable reaction. In the animal kingdom, this kind of communication is very widespread, mice have approximately 300 different genes for pheromone receptors but in humans they have been more difficult to pin down. The belief is that perhaps only five of them are still…

Researchers have taken a step toward using the implantation of stem cell-generated neurons as a treatment for Parkinson's disease.  Parkinson's, which affect as many 10 million people in the world, is linked to a depletion of dopamine-producing neurons in the brain. Current treatments include medications and electrical implants in the brain which cause severe adverse effects over time and fail to prevent disease progression. Several studies have indicated that the transplantation of embryonic stem cells improves motor functions in animal models but the procedure has shown to be unsafe,…