Depression Study Fuels Debate On Whether to Treat With Drugs By Marc Siegel A study last month in The Lancet, a major British medical journal, uncovered 93 cases of seizures in infants whose mothers had been taking selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) antidepressants, most commonly Paxil (paroxetine). The article suggests that a baby whose mother is using SSRIs may suffer withdrawal symptoms including seizures when the child is born and abruptly stops getting the drug through the mother's bloodstream. But the study -- based on a survey of reports of adverse drug reactions -- contains no definitive evidence of this effect. There has been no clinical trial comparing infants whose moms did and didn't take Paxil during pregnancy. (Paxil is available to pregnant women by prescription, though manufacturer GlaxoSmithKline says on its Web site that some complications, including seizures, have been reported in babies whose mothers had used the drug during pregnancy.) However inconclusive, the Lancet report has provoked a new alarm about the effects of these antidepressant medications, whose safety in older children and whose impact on suicide has been widely questioned recently. It also has refocused attention on a crucial issue: Which is worse, the side effects of an imperfect but effective drug, or the serious condition it is intended to treat? © Copyright 1996-2005 The Washington Post Company

Keyword: Depression; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 6949 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Three key drugs to treat memory loss associated with Alzheimer's disease could be withdrawn after an assessment by the NHS treatment advisory body. The National Institute for Clinical Excellence has put forward the draft guidance after assessing the clinical and cost effectiveness of the drugs. A final decision on using donepezil, rivastigmine and galantamine in England and Wales will be made in July. Patients already taking the drugs would not have them withdrawn, Nice said. The guidance does not mean the drugs do not work or are harmful, just that the cost to the NHS does not warrant the benefits gained from patients taking them. The drugs, which campaigners estimate cost £2.50 per day per patient, improve memory and can make daily living tasks easier. Campaigners and medical experts condemned the move, which reverses previous Nice guidance in 2001 that said the drugs should be used as standard. Alzheimer's Society chief executive Neil Hunt said: "We are stunned at the proposal that vulnerable people with Alzheimer's disease should not receive treatments that have been proven to work. "If these initial recommendations are finally approved, thousands of people with dementia will be denied the only drug treatment available to them. "This seems just another example of the NHS failing to take dementia seriously as a medical condition. "Despite the fact that these drugs are proven to work, Nice believes that they aren't good value for money. We know they are." And Professor Simon Lovestone, of the Alzheimer's Research Trust, said it was "appalling" to deny the treatment to patients. "While the drugs do not help everyone, many carers and families have told us they have been a huge help." Professor Susan Benbow, of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, said while they did not cure the disease the drugs brought "substantial benefits". (C)BBC

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 6948 - Posted: 03.01.2005

By NICHOLAS BAKALAR Why soccer would be a risk for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis is a mystery. But a new study has found that Italian professional soccer players get the disease at a rate nearly six times as great as the general population. The study, led by Dr. Adriano Chiò, a professor in the department of neuroscience at the University of Turin, was inspired by the work of an Italian prosecutor, Raffaele Guariniello, who was investigating soccer players' use of illegal drugs. As part of his inquiry, he ordered a report on the causes of death among 24,000 men who played professional or semiprofessional soccer in Italy from 1960 to 1996. His finding - that Italian players died of A.L.S. at a rate almost 12 times as great as normal - puzzled researchers, who decided to undertake a much more rigorous study. A.L.S., often called Lou Gehrig's disease, is an incurable and invariably fatal degenerative disease of the nervous system. Although there have been many suggestions about the possible risks for the illness, including participation in sports, no clear-cut evidence has been found for any risk factors except age and sex. (A.L.S. tends to strike around age 60, and a vast majority of patients are men.) Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

Keyword: ALS-Lou Gehrig's Disease
Link ID: 6947 - Posted: 03.01.2005

By Molly Bentley For nearly a decade, Cornell University researcher Christopher Clark has been eavesdropping on the ocean, hoping to decipher the enigmatic songs of whales. Using old US Navy hydrophones once employed to track submarines, he has collected thousands of acoustical tracks of singing blue, fin, humpback and minke whales. His bioacoustics lab is now able to pinpoint the location of individual singers, and determine the length of their song. As a result, he's had to redraw the map of whale acoustics. "The range is enormous," explained Dr Clark. "They have voices that span an entire ocean." Drawing on newly declassified acoustic data from the Sound Surveillance System (SOSUS), and using new tools that can crunch high volumes of them, Dr Clark has determined that whales' songs travel over thousands of kilometres and also that increasing noise pollution in the oceans impedes the animals' ability to communicate. It is not certain whether whales thousands of kilometres apart communicate directly with each other, or what their messages contain. But the results support a 30-year theory that, before the advent of modern shipping, the animals' booming voices would have resounded from one ocean basin to another. With sound that is loud and low, in other words, "beautifully designed" for long distance travel, the singing of a whale in the waters off Puerto Rico could carry 2,600km to the shores of Newfoundland, says Dr Clark. When scientists create a digital map of the sound as it propagates in the water, it "illuminates the entire ocean", he adds. The pan-oceanic range is fitting for massive 30-190-tonne creatures that rely on reflected sound, rather than light, to navigate. (C)BBC

Keyword: Hearing
Link ID: 6946 - Posted: 03.01.2005

By DIANE ACKERMAN On a sparkling hot Florida day, I walked from an elevator into a small dark lobby and strode out the open door at speed. Except that the door wasn't open. It was an unmarked sheet of clean clear glass that clobbered me on the forehead two inches above my right eye. I didn't pass out, see double, grow confused or feel nauseated. I did feel shaken, though, drove straight home, iced the area and rested. For several days, I felt subdued, with low-level headaches. The world shone brighter than usual, which I attributed to the howling Florida sun. I tired easily and wasn't up to higher thought. My mind didn't feel it could do stairs. It took three days before I admitted that I had a concussion. I went to the hospital for a CT scan, which showed no bleeding in the brain, thank heavens, and afterward I asked if I might have a look at the digital images of my brain and skull. How strange it was using my mobile, pink, three-dimensional brain to see itself frozen in time, starkly black and white, out of its box, on a two-dimensional screen that humans designed to provide the illusion of depth. I knew that terrain intimately, but with more detail and hubbub. Where were the canyons of the mind? Where were all the curly haired selves? I scouted the images. At first glance, I was glad to find no spongy patches (some of Alzheimer's footprints) and no obvious shrinkage. Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 6945 - Posted: 03.01.2005

By CARL ZIMMER A team of Dutch scientists is trying to solve the mystery of personality. Why are some individuals shy while others are bold, for example? What roles do genes and environment play in shaping personalities? And most mysterious of all, how did they evolve? The scientists are carrying out an ambitious series of experiments to answer these questions. They are studying thousands of individuals, observing how they interact with others, comparing their personalities to their descendants' and analyzing their DNA. It may come as a surprise that their subjects have feathers. The scientists, based at the Netherlands Institute of Ecology, are investigating personalities of wild birds. Until recently, most experts in personality would have considered such a study as nothing but foolish anthropomorphism. "It's been looked at with suspicion and contempt," said Dr. Samuel Gosling, a psychologist at the University of Texas. But scientists have found that in many species, individual animals behave in consistently different ways. They argue that these differences meet the scientific definition of personality. Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 6944 - Posted: 03.01.2005

The human brain is estimated to contain 100 billion neurons (the number 1 followed by eleven zeros). Because a typical neuron forms ~1,000 synaptic connections to other neurons, the total number of synapses in the brain is estimated to be 100 trillion (the number 1 followed by 14 zeros). The thin projections from neurons that form connections with each other (axons and dendrites) can be thought of as the biological "wiring" of the brain. Neuroscientists already know that brain neurons can and do form specific rather than random connections with each other to generate the observed wiring diagram of the brain. However, the precise patterns of such non-random connections, how the patterns are formed, and how these patterns underlie the brain's extraordinary information processing capacity are important questions that Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory theoretical neuroscientist Dmitri Chklovskii is exploring. An article published in this week's issue of PLoS Biology (March 1, 2005) describes Chklovskii's discovery of strongly preferred patterns of connectivity or scaffolds within the wiring diagram of the rat brain. The patterns are likely to correspond to modules that play an important role in brain function not only in rats, but also in humans. Chklovskii and his colleagues use statistical analysis and mathematical modeling--coupled with in vivo, experimental observations--to search for recurrent, non-random patterns of local connectivity within the vast thickets of brain wiring diagrams.

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 6943 - Posted: 03.01.2005

REVIEWED BY JOHN CORNWELL In a California courthouse in 1978 the jury in a murder case was presented with a bizarre item of evidence. Dan White, a former police officer, had walked into City Hall, San Francisco, and shot dead mayor George Moscone and supervisor Harvey Milk. But White was found guilty of nothing more than involuntary manslaughter after the jury accepted a plea that he had eaten on the morning of the incident a large number of “sugar-ice” Twinkie cakes. The sugar overload affected his brain chemistry, argued the defence, making an automoton of their client. It became known as the Twinkie Defence and the relationship between brain chemistry and responsibility would never be the same again. In the 1970s, neuroscience and descriptions of the relationship between the brain and its chemistry were still, relatively speaking, in their infancy. The imminent and rapid expansion of new brain science was to have far-reaching cultural and social consequences. How the final decade of the 20th century came to be associated with a drive to understand the mind/brain relationship forms a fascinating chapter in the history of western science. Brain research gathered momentum in the 1980s, propelled by remarkable breakthroughs in genetics, cell biology, computer-modelling and non-invasive scanning techniques. At last it was possible for researchers to explore the brain and central nervous system without destroying what they probed. As the cold war ended, neuroscience began to enjoy ever-higher priority as a recipient of state and corporate support. A crucial impulse came from the biotech and pharmaceutical industries, whose strategists were hailing a new age of rationally designed brain drugs, their profits boosted by cure-alls for everything from pain to Alzheimer’s. But there were other, wildly hubristic motives. On January 1, 1990, the House and Senate of the US government designated the 1990s the “Decade of the Brain”, claiming that some $350 billion were lost to the American economy each year as a result of mind/brain-related ills: from sick leave for depression to gangland shootings. If only scientists could make a pill to make mad people sane, and a pill to make violent people serene. Copyright 2005 Times Newspapers Ltd.

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 6942 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Children who "miss" things on their left field of vision may have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, Medical Research Council scientists say. The phenomenon means children may miss the first letters of a written word, leading doctors to diagnose dyslexia. However, it can also mean children only write or draw on the right-hand side of a page, or that they knock things on their left-hand side over more often. The condition is seen in adults who have had stroke. "Left neglect" is seen where the right side of the brain is affected. It means things on someone's left-hand side are simply not noticed, especially if they are doing something they find boring or unstimulating. Children who do not have ADHD may also show symptoms of the condition, the researchers say. The research is published in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, and in Brain and Cognition. Left neglect is a well-known condition in adults who have suffered right-sided brain injury. It means they may act as if half the world has simply disappeared. Researchers from the MRC's Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, in Cambridge, found some children with ADHD, who had no brain damage and perfectly normal intelligence, showed left neglect as severe as that seen in some adults with substantial damage to the right side of the brain. This latest study asked parents and teachers of healthy Nottingham children to assess how much they ran around or fidgeted - potential indications of ADHD. (C)BBC

Keyword: ADHD; Laterality
Link ID: 6941 - Posted: 03.01.2005

A new study finds men treated with hormone therapy for prostate cancer may experience temporary cognitive changes that can affect verbal fluency, visual recognition and visual memory. The study, published in the April 1, 2005 issue of CANCER (http://www.interscience.wiley.com/cancer-newsroom), a peer-reviewed journal of the American Cancer Society, finds the degree of cognitive dysfunction appeared to be related to a decline in serum estradiol brought on by hormonal treatment. Androgen-deprivation therapy (AD) is an effective adjuvant therapy in the treatment of prostate cancer. It effectively reduces levels of testosterone, which acts as a tumor stimulant, and estradiol, a form of estrogen in men. Testosterone and estradiol are known to be important in neurological development and play a particularly important role in the cognitive areas of learning and memory. Previous studies in women have shown declining estradiol levels to effect cognition but until now little data existed in men. Eeva Salminen, M.D. and colleagues at Turku University Hospital in Turku, Finland investigated the relationship between serum estradiol and cognitive functioning in men with prostate cancer treated with androgen-deprivation therapy. They found cognitive performance in several specific areas were associated with declines in estradiol brought on by the therapy. Six months into treatment, men were found to have temporary, marginal but significant declines in visual memory of figures and recognition speed of numbers. Tests at twelve months showed marginal improvement in verbal fluency associated with estradiol declines. No other cognitive areas were affected. The degree of cognitive change was related to the magnitude of estradiol declines.

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 6940 - Posted: 03.01.2005

Electrical deep brain stimulation can dramatically alleviate depression that is resistant to other treatments, researchers have found in an initial study on six patients. The finding is important, they said, because up to 20 percent of patients with depression fail to respond to standard treatments--requiring combinations of antidepressant drugs, psychotherapy, and electroconvulsive treatment (ECT) that still may fail. The number of resistant depression patients can be large, since depression is the leading source of disability in adults under age 50 in North America. The 6 month study led by Helen Mayberg of Emory University School of Medicine and colleagues showed that the patients reported immediate improvements in mood when the electrical stimulation of a few volts was applied to the implanted electrodes. These effects persisted in four of the patients for the full 6 months, with three patients achieving remission or near remission of the depression. No psychological side effects were reported, and other adverse effects were limited to minor infections around the implant site, which were treatable with antibiotics, wrote the researchers. The researchers concluded that, although the study was limited in scope and length, deep brain stimulation "may represent an effective, novel intervention for severely disabled patients with treatment-resistant depression."

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 6939 - Posted: 03.01.2005

By E.J. Mundell -- Are men better than women when it comes to certain intellectual tasks, such as remembering the location of objects? While debate rages, 112 monkeys (and a few scientists) have been hard at work puzzling it out. Researchers report that, when challenged by a kind of food-baited shell game, young male monkeys outperformed females at correctly remembering the location of the prize. But with just a minimum of training, that intellectual gender gap closed completely. That suggests that any gender-based differences in intellect -- whether simian or human -- "are plastic, they aren't rigid. You can develop these skills," said lead researcher Agnes Lacreuse, a professor of neuroscience at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center in Atlanta. According to Lacreuse, the study results echo similar findings in humans when it comes to gender-based differences in what neuroscientists call "spatial cognition" -- the ability to visualize, remember and manipulate objects in three-dimensional space. © 2005 Forbes.com Inc.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 6938 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Philadelphia, PA – In the first study to examine living nerve cells from patients with psychiatric disease, scientists from the Monell Chemical Senses Center, the University of Pennsylvania, and collaborating institutions report altered nerve cell function in olfactory receptor neurons from patients with bipolar disorder. Like other psychiatric and neurodegenerative disorders, bipolar disorder affects nerve cells in the brain, making it difficult to study underlying neurobiological causes of the disease during its actual course. According to senior author Nancy Rawson, PhD, a Monell cellular biologist, "Previous studies have used non-nerve cells, such as fibroblasts or red blood cells, to examine how cells function in patients with bipolar disorder. But since this is a psychiatric disorder, we need to understand what's going on in nerve cells." Olfactory receptor neurons (ORNs), located in a small patch of epithelium inside the nose, are nerve cells that contain receptors for the thousands of odorant molecules detected by humans. Easily obtained using a simple 5-minute biopsy procedure, ORNs share many characteristics with nerve cells in the brain. These features make ORNs a useful model to study the neural effects of psychiatric disease.

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 6937 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Early Alzheimer's disease may be precipitated by a “traffic jam” within neurons that causes swelling and prevents proper transport of proteins and structures in the cells, according to new studies by Howard Hughes Medical Institute researchers. In mouse models of Alzheimer's disease and in human brain samples from people with the disease, researchers observed a characteristic breakdown in neurons that appears to prevent the normal movement of critical proteins to the communications centers of the nerve cells. In a vicious cycle, the traffic jam also could increase production of an abnormal protein that clogs neurons, leading to their failure and eventual death. The researchers said their findings could provide information that might be used to develop drugs to preserve the molecular transport system and thus the viability of brain cells otherwise lost in Alzheimer's. The findings also could ultimately lead to distinctive markers of early Alzheimer's disease that could be used in early diagnostic tests for the disorder, they said. The research team led by Lawrence S. B. Goldstein, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), reported their findings in the February 25, 2005, issue of the journal Science. Goldstein and his colleagues at UCSD collaborated on the studies with a researcher at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. © 2005 Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 6936 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By JANE GROSS Sixth grade was a trying time for Karen Singer's autistic son, who spent recess wandering the periphery of the playground by himself and sometimes hid in the school bathroom when he needed a safe place to cry. He knew he was doing something wrong as he reached the social crucible of middle school, but he did not know how to fix it. At home he begged his mother to explain: "Why am I like this? What's wrong with me?" Intensive behavioral treatment, popularized over the last 10 years, prepared him academically and helped him get by in regular classes for years. But social skills are more elusive for autistic children, and the gap widens with each passing year. Classmates who once tolerated his peculiarities now shunned him. Their interests had changed to hanging out and being cool, while he remained preoccupied with saltwater fish and Yu-Gi-Oh trading cards. During group projects the boy rigidly held his ground on small matters, like what color ink to use. When challenged, he blurted out, "You're stupid!" or other inappropriate retorts. "It was shocking how it all of a sudden fell apart," said Ms. Singer, who asked that her son, now 13, not be identified by name or hometown and thus be further stigmatized. "He'd never say, 'I don't want to go to school.' He'd make it through the day, then come home and melt down." Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 6935 - Posted: 02.26.2005

Jonathan Rée I always enjoy being part of an audience waiting for the curtain to go up on an evening's entertainment. But here at the Eden Court Theatre in Inverness, it is rather different. The show is already a few minutes late, but people are still standing around in the aisles, hailing long-lost friends from one side of the theatre to the other and rattling off their news. And yet it is also curiously peaceful. Apart from a couple of lusty babies cooing and chuckling to each other, and occasional bursts of laughter, the theatre is quite silent. With the exception of those two babies and me, nearly everyone here is deaf, and they are chattering away in a silent language—the language of signs. They have come from all over the country to attend a special congress of the British Deaf Association (BDA). And as I can see all around me, they are relishing the chance to take over a large space and, for once, to watch their own form of communication prevail. Most people recognise nowadays that sign languages are linguistically much the same as any other language. They are autonomous linguistic systems, independent of spoken languages on the one hand and mimicry and pantomime on the other. Linguists have identified more than 100 separate sign languages, from Adamorobe and Algerian to Croatian and Venezuelan, all of them different from each other, and all displaying the same kinds of characteristics that define mainstream languages. Just like their spoken counterparts, sign languages are essentially collections of arbitrary symbols that little children can learn to reiterate and recombine without limit, even if the finest grammarians may have difficulty sorting out their syntax. And as I marvel at the quiet hurly-burly that surrounds me, with dozens of conversations flashing round the theatre but no one being interrupted or distracted by anyone else, I can see the practical and aesthetic advantages of signing compared with the loud, rude intrusiveness of speech. © Copyright 2004 - Prospect Magazine

Keyword: Hearing
Link ID: 6934 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Grimace all you want gourmands but it won't stop most Americans from surrendering to the appeal of quick-to-cook prepared foods that lure the stomach with succulent looking snapshots and highly tailored branding. In part, purveyors of fine taste have cause to wrinkle their nose about one thing: As easy cooking as prepared meals are they're often not so easy on your health. Consider canning. High temperatures involved in processing food prompts sugar and amino acids to produce a bitter taste that's usually masked with high amounts of table salt, associated with high blood pressure and heart disease. But very soon food manufacturers could have a healthier alternative. "With the sequencing of the human genome all the machinery of taste began to be understood…so that allowed us to think of ways of applying drug discovery technology to make new molecules that would modify your sense of taste, " explains chemist Ray Salemme. Salemme, CEO of Linguagen Corporation, a New Jersey company featured in the March issue of Discover Magazine, is working to block bitter signals to the brain. Interrupting those signals could reduce the salt some manufacturers use to make bitter foods taste good. The process involves manipulating about 10,000 taste buds that regenerate every two weeks. Each taste bud has 50 to 100 cells informed by genes that tell the surface cells which proteins---or receptors---to make. As you eat, food molecules like salt, or sodium chloride, attach to a receptor that binds to that molecule. Then, nerve fibers connected to the taste cell shoot signals to the brain, where five universal flavors---salty, bitter, sweet, sour and a savory flavor called umami---register. "We can put so called screening tools in place to measure compounds on the specific receptors and we can use that as a strategy to find molecules that in some cases will turn them off," Salemme says. © ScienCentral, 2000- 2005.

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 6933 - Posted: 06.24.2010

When Karen Zipern graduated from college she took a job in media relations in New York City. At the end of each day, she returned to her apartment, locked the door to the outside world, and began to cry. The transition from the familiarity of college, to a wide-open future overwhelmed Karen. “I couldn’t stop crying,” she remembers. She could only find comfort when she was cocooned in her apartment with her dog and a stack of books. This was the first of several episodes of major depression Karen faced through her adult life. Though she tried antidepressants and other psychiatric therapies, she says depression “was always just around the corner.” Karen, who is now 48 and an administrative director at Columbia University Medical Center, suspected her mother also suffered from depression, but the two rarely shared their feelings. In the Zipern family the standard was to grit your teeth and work through your “blue days.” Over the last few years however, Karen’s experience with depression helped her mother Sydell, 73, her sister Jill, 52, and her niece Carly, 22, to acknowledge they had a heightened susceptibility to depression and that major life changes could trigger the illness in each of them. Two years ago, almost simultaneously, when Sydell sold her home of 50 years, Jill began menopause, and Carly got caught in slump at college, all three women were diagnosed with major depressive disorder. © ScienCentral, 2000- 2005.

Keyword: Depression; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 6932 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Gay men employ the same strategies for navigating as women - using landmarks to find their way around - a new study suggests. But they also use the strategies typically used by straight men, such as using compass directions and distances. In contrast, gay women read maps just like straight women, reveals the study of 80 heterosexual and homosexual men and women. "Gay men adopt male and female strategies. Therefore their brains are a sexual mosaic," explains Qazi Rahman, a psychobiologist who led the study at the University of East London, UK. "It's not simply that lesbians have men's brains and gay men have women's brains." The stereotype that women are relatively poor map readers is borne out by a reasonable bulk of scientific literature, notes Rahman. "Men, particularly, excel at spatial navigation." The new study might help researchers understand how cognitive differences and sexual orientation develop in the womb, he says. Previous tests challenging men and women to make their way through virtual-reality mazes, or real-life scenarios, have shown that men tend to be speedier and use different strategies to women. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 6931 - Posted: 06.24.2010

A cellular enzyme appears to play a crucial role in the manufacture of a protein needed for long-term memory, according to a team of researchers led by scientists at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development of the National Institutes of Health. The protein is known as mBDNF, which stands for mature brain-derived neurotrophic factor. In an earlier study, another team of NICHD researchers had shown that mBDNF is essential for the formation of long-term memory, the ability to remember things for longer than a day. “Understanding how BDNF is made may help us to better understand the learning process, perhaps leading to better treatments for disorders of learning and memory,” said Duane Alexander, M.D., Director of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. The research team was led by Y.Peng Loh Ph.D, of NICHD’s Section on Cellular Neurobiology. The researchers published their work in the January 20 issue of Neuron. Specifically, the researchers discovered that the enzyme carboxypeptidase E, (CPE) is needed to deliver the early, or inactive, form of BDNF — proBDNF — to a special compartment in the neuron (nerve cell.) Once in the compartment, proBDNF is chemically converted into active mBDNF. After mBDNF is formed, it is released to the outside of the neuron, where it binds to receptors on other neurons and stimulates them to form long-term memory.

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Trophic Factors
Link ID: 6930 - Posted: 06.24.2010