Beth Marsh, Lilla Porffy, Meryem Grabski, Will Lawn January 2018 has come to an end and with it the month that people increasingly use to abstain from alcohol. It is still unknown whether Dry January has a lasting effect on drinking behaviours, and people with an alcohol dependency problem should always seek support from their GP before going through detox. Nonetheless, Dry January undoubtedly drives a critical conversation about alcohol use and provides an opportunity for us to reconsider our relationship with alcohol (one of the main goals of the charity Alcohol Concern, who support the challenge). While overall alcohol consumption in the UK is falling, alcohol abuse still represents the fifth biggest risk factor for illness, death and disability across all ages. With current treatments often failing to prevent relapse in the long term, researchers are investigating the possibility of using ketamine combined with psychological therapy to help people stay dry, and not just for January. Despite its often cited use as a recreational drug and “horse-tranquilizer” ketamine is also the most widely used anaesthetic in humans. Administered appropriately in a controlled and safe medical environment, ketamine may also have benefits in the treatment of drug problems. Evidence for this originally came from a research group in Russia in the 1980s. In this study, patients who had alcohol problems were given three weekly ketamine treatments in conjunction with psychological therapy. After one year, 66% of patients who underwent this treatment regime were abstinent, in comparison to 24% of patients who received treatment as usual, without any ketamine. This abstinence rate is much greater than those documented with any other relapse prevention method. © 2018 Guardian News and Media Limited

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 24619 - Posted: 02.06.2018

Dana Boebinger Roughly 15 percent of Americans report some sort of hearing difficulty; trouble understanding conversations in noisy environments is one of the most common complaints. Unfortunately, there’s not much doctors or audiologists can do. Hearing aids can amplify things for ears that can’t quite pick up certain sounds, but they don’t distinguish between the voice of a friend at a party and the music in the background. The problem is not only one of technology, but also of brain wiring. Most hearing aid users say that even with their hearing aids, they still have difficulty communicating in noisy environments. As a neuroscientist who studies speech perception, this issue is prominent in much of my own research, as well as that of many others. The reason isn’t that they can’t hear the sounds; it’s that their brains can’t pick out the conversation from the background chatter. Harvard neuroscientists Dan Polley and Jonathon Whitton may have found a solution, by harnessing the brain’s incredible ability to learn and change itself. They have discovered that it may be possible for the brain to relearn how to distinguish between speech and noise. And the key to learning that skill could be a video game. People with hearing aids often report being frustrated with how their hearing aids handle noisy situations; it’s a key reason many people with hearing loss don’t wear hearing aids, even if they own them. People with untreated hearing loss – including those who don’t wear their hearing aids – are at increased risk of social isolation, depression and even dementia. © 2010–2018, The Conversation US, Inc.

Keyword: Hearing; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 24618 - Posted: 02.06.2018

By Jim Daley Researchers at the D’Or Institute for Research and Education in Brazil have created an algorithm that can use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data to identify which musical pieces participants are listening to. The study, published last Friday (February 2) in Scientific Reports, involved six participants listening to 40 pieces of music from various genres, including classical, rock, pop, and jazz. “Our approach was capable of identifying musical pieces with improving accuracy across time and spatial coverage,” the researchers write in the paper. “It is worth noting that these results were obtained for a heterogeneous stimulus set . . . including distinct emotional categories of joy and tenderness.” The researchers first played different musical pieces for the participants and used fMRI to measure the neural signatures of each song. With that data, they taught a computer to identify brain activity that corresponded with the musical dimensions of each piece, including tonality, rhythm, and timbre, as well as a set of lower-level acoustic features. Then, the researchers played the pieces for the participants again while the computer tried to identify the music each person was listening to, based on fMRI responses. The computer was successful in decoding the fMRI information and identifying the musical pieces around 77 percent of the time when it had two options to choose from. When the researchers presented 10 possibilities, the computer was correct 74 percent of the time. © 1986-2018 The Scientist

Keyword: Hearing; Brain imaging
Link ID: 24617 - Posted: 02.06.2018

By VERONIQUE GREENWOOD Of the five tastes — sweet, salty, sour, bitter and umami — sour is one of the most mysterious. Bite into a piece of lemon and — bing! — your brain gets a message that something sour has arrived. But unlike sweet and bitter, for example, for which biologists have identified proteins on the tongue’s taste cells that detect the molecules involved, the sourness of acids like lemon juice and vinegar has remained enigmatic, with the exact details of how we pick up on it little understood. Now, however, in a paper published last month in Science, researchers report that they have found a protein in mouse taste cells that is likely a key player in the detection of sour flavors. There’s just one strange thing, though: Biologists have known about this protein for years. It was previously identified in the inner ear, or vestibular system, of mice, humans and many other creatures, where it is required for developing a sense of balance. The results suggest a fascinating truth about evolution: The first place something is discovered may not be the last place it turns up. If it has proved advantageous over the eons, a protein whose purpose we thought we understood may have a rich private life of its own elsewhere in the body, just waiting to be found. Similar discoveries have cropped up more and more in the last decade as researchers look more closely at which genes cells are using. This approach has led to the revelations that smell receptors are alive and well in the kidneys, bitter taste receptors dot the sinuses and testes, and sweet taste receptors are found in the bladder. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste); Hearing
Link ID: 24616 - Posted: 02.05.2018

Allison Aubrey To age well, we must eat well — there's been a lot of evidence that heart-healthy diets help protect the brain. The latest good news: A study recently published in Neurology finds that healthy seniors who had daily helpings of leafy green vegetables — such as spinach, kale and collard greens — had a slower rate of cognitive decline, compared to those who tended to eat little or no greens. "The association is quite strong," says study author Martha Clare Morris, a professor of nutrition science at Rush Medical College in Chicago. She also directs the Rush Institute for Healthy Aging. The research included 960 participants of the Memory and Aging Project. Their average age is 81, and none of them have dementia. Each year the participants undergo a battery of tests to assess their memory. Scientists also keep track their eating habits and lifestyle habits. To analyze the relationship between leafy greens and age-related cognitive changes, the researchers assigned each participant to one of five groups, according to the amount of greens eaten. Those who tended to eat the most greens comprised the top quintile, consuming, on average, about 1.3 servings per day. Those in the bottom quintile said they consume little or no greens. After about five years of follow-up/observation, "the rate of decline for [those] in the top quintile was about half the decline rate of those in the lowest quintile," Morris says. So, what's the most convenient way to get these greens into your diet? © 2018 npr

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 24615 - Posted: 02.05.2018

By Brian Resnick Football isn’t just a contact sport — it’s a dangerous game of massive bodies colliding into one another. And while it may seem obvious that this sport can do extraordinary damage to brains and bodies, it’s taken far too long for the NFL, the medical community, and football fans to fully reckon with this. And there’s no question that the legacy — and persistent threat — of brain injuries will haunt this Sunday’s Super Bowl match between the New England Patriots and the Philadelphia Eagles. The Patriots’ star tight end, Rob Gronkowski, was only cleared earlier this week for play after sustaining a concussion in the NFL Conference Championships win over the Jacksonville Jaguars on January 21. On game day, the NFL will have in place four concussion specialists around the field to ensure player safety. Even halftime performer Justin Timberlake told reporters his 3-year-old son will never play football, though it wasn’t entirely clear if he was joking. Doctors have learned a tremendous amount about concussions and chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, a degenerative brain condition believed to be caused by repeated hits to the head, since the first former NFL player was diagnosed with CTE in the early 2000s. Concern around the issue has only grown now that more than 100 former NFL players have received a postmortem diagnosis of CTE. All the evidence we now have about the very serious risk of brain injuries in football casts a dim light on the future of the sport.

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 24614 - Posted: 02.05.2018

By EMILY KELLY My husband, Rob Kelly, is a retired N.F.L. player. After five seasons as a safety beginning in the late 1990s, four with the New Orleans Saints and one with the New England Patriots, he sustained an injury to a nerve between his neck and shoulder during training camp that ended his career. By the time he retired in 2002 at 28, he had been playing tackle football for about two decades. Rob had no idea, however, that all those years of playing would have such serious consequences. Safeties are the last line of defense and among the hardest hitters in the game. One tackle he attempted while playing for the Saints was so damaging, he doesn’t remember the rest of the game. He got up, ran off the field and tried to go back in — as an offensive player. He knows this only because people told him the next day. Professional football is a brutal sport, he knew that. But he loved it anyway. And he accepted the risks of bruises and broken bones. What he didn’t know was that along with a battered body can come a battered mind. For decades, it was not well understood that football can permanently harm the brain. Otherwise, many parents would most likely not have signed their boys up to play. But this reality was obscured by the N.F.L.’s top medical experts, who for years had denied any link between the sport and long-term degenerative brain diseases like chronic traumatic encephalopathy. That started to change in late 2009 when, for the first time, the N.F.L. publicly acknowledged that concussions can have long-term effects. In 2016, a top league official admitted that there is a connection between football and C.T.E., which has now been found in the brains of more than 100 deceased players. But for Rob, and countless other players, those admissions came too late. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 24613 - Posted: 02.05.2018

By Kendall Powell “It’s impossible that we still struggle to decide if coffee is healthy or unhealthy,” says Giuseppe Grosso, a nutritional epidemiologist at the University of Catania in Italy: Good for hypertension one week. Bad for hypertension the next. To address this vexing situation, Grosso and his colleagues collected all studies on the health effects of coffee, systematically reviewed the evidence, then offered up their bottom line in the Annual Review of Nutrition. Specifically, they looked at 127 meta-analyses, which lump together and statistically analyze studies on similar topics. A few of the studies were randomized controlled trials on coffee or caffeine administration, but most were observational studies of real-world coffee and caffeine consumption habits. (None of the review’s authors were paid by any food or beverage company.) For each meta-analysis, the team calculated the strength of the study’s designs and conclusions and then ranked its evidence for relationships between coffee and health on a scale from “convincing” all the way down to “limited.” No studies showed a “convincing” level of evidence — not surprisingly, since observational studies lack the rigor of ­gold-standard trials that use placebo controls. But several found “probable” evidence that coffee-drinking is associated with a decreased risk of many common cancers — including breast, colorectal, colon, endometrial and prostate — with a 2 to 20 percent reduction in risk, depending on the cancer type. © 1996-2018 The Washington Post

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 24612 - Posted: 02.05.2018

By JOANNA KLEIN Plants don’t get enough credit. They move. You know this. Your houseplant salutes the sun each morning. At night, it returns to center. You probably don’t think much of it. This is simply what plants do: Get light. Photosynthesize. Make food. Live. But what about all the signs of plant intelligence that have been observed? Under poor soil conditions, the pea seems to be able to assess risk. The sensitive plant can make memories and learn to stop recoiling if you mess with it enough. The Venus fly trap appears to count when insects trigger its trap. And plants can communicate with one another and with caterpillars. Now, a study published recently in Annals of Botany has shown that plants can be frozen in place with a range of anesthetics, including the types that are used when you undergo surgery. Insights gleaned from the study may help doctors better understand the variety of anesthetics used in surgeries. But the research also highlights that plants are complex organisms, perhaps less different from animals than is often assumed. “Plants are not just robotic, stimulus-response devices,” said Frantisek Baluska, a plant cell biologist at the University of Bonn in Germany and co-author of the study. “They’re living organisms which have their own problems, maybe something like with humans feeling pain or joy.” “In order to navigate this complex life, they must have some compass.” © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Consciousness; Sleep
Link ID: 24611 - Posted: 02.03.2018

By Katie Langin Woodpeckers repeatedly whack their heads against trees with a force 10 times that of a concussion-inducing football tackle, yet they seem no worse for the wear. That has inspired some athletic companies to model helmets and neck collars on the head-banging birds. But woodpeckers may not be immune to head trauma after all. A new study shows that a protein whose abnormal buildup is considered a sign of human brain damage also accumulates in woodpecker brains. That raises an intriguing question: Could the newly discovered “tangles” of this protein, tau, be protecting the woodpecker brain from injury? The idea of concussionless woodpeckers dates back to 1976, when a seminal study that examined sections of the birds’ brains found no evidence of injury. That research spurred “a cascade of papers” on woodpecker biomechanics and their force-resisting adaptations, says George Farah, a neurobiologist at Boston University. Because the old study used an outdated staining method to reveal damage in the brain, he and his colleagues decided to redo the work with 21st century technology. They asked several museums for woodpecker specimens whose brains they could study. Their final haul: six downy woodpeckers, one yellow-bellied sapsucker, one northern flicker, one pale-billed woodpecker, and one lineated woodpecker. For comparison, they also got five brains from a non–head-banging species, the red-winged blackbird. © 2018 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 24610 - Posted: 02.03.2018

Ian Sample Science editor A nasal spray that delivers a natural painkiller to the brain could transform the lives of patients by replacing the dangerous and addictive prescription opioids that have wreaked havoc in the US and claimed the lives of thousands of people. Scientists at University College London found they could alleviate pain in animals with a nasal spray that delivered millions of soluble nanoparticles filled with a natural opioid directly into the brain. In lab tests, the animals showed no signs of becoming tolerant to the compound’s pain-relieving effects, meaning the risk of overdose should be far lower. The researchers are now raising funds for the first clinical trial in humans to assess the spray’s safety. They will start with healthy volunteers who will receive the nasal spray to see if it helps them endure the pain of immersing one of their arms in ice-cold water. “If people don’t develop tolerance, you don’t have them always having to up the dose. And if they don’t have to up the dose, they won’t get closer and closer to overdose,” said Ijeoma Uchegbu, a professor of pharmaceutical nanoscience who is leading the research through Nanomerics, a UCL startup. If the first human safety trial is successful, the scientists will move on to more trials to investigate whether the nasal spray can bring swift relief to patients with bone cancer who experience sudden and excruciating bouts of pain.

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 24609 - Posted: 02.03.2018

By Viviane Callier People who experience blast-related trauma to the brain, a condition that has become more and more common among combat veterans, can later experience depression and heightened anxiety, even in the absence of a psychological stressor. Patients are usually treated with medications (particularly antidepressants) and behavioral therapy, but these are often only partially effective. In search of a more-effective drug, researchers have found that a compound that blocks certain glutamate receptors in the brain reverses many of the post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)-like symptoms that appear after rats endure a blast injury, they report in eNeuro this week (January 29). The drug, called BCI-838, is already in human clinical trials for the treatment of depression. “What makes this paper a really nice addition to the literature is that it comes from a good group that over the years has honed and refined a very legitimate, biologically relevant, and battlefield-relevant animal model,” says David Cook, who studies neurodegenerative disease at the VA Puget Sound and the University of Washington and who was not involved in the study. “This compound, which has plausibility for clinical use, was quite efficacious in ameliorating the PTSD-like symptoms that were caused by blast exposure a long time afterwards. This is the kind of stuff everyone is looking for.” Recent improvements in body armor have increased the chance that military personnel survive blast exposures that, a few years ago, would have killed them. But the result is that mild, repetitive TBI has become a signature wound of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, explains Cook. It isn’t unusual to encounter veterans who have been exposed to—and survived—more than 100 blasts, he says. © 1986-2018 The Scientist

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion; Stress
Link ID: 24608 - Posted: 02.03.2018

By Matt Warren The cheetah is built for running, with long limbs and powerful muscles that propel it along as it chases down its prey. But a new study has found that the world’s fastest land mammal has another, less obvious adaptation hidden away in its inner ear. Scientists suspected that the cheetah might also rely on a specialized vestibular system, the part of the inner ear that detects head movements and helps animals maintain their gaze and posture. Using computerized tomography scans, they created detailed 3D images of the inner ear from the skulls of cheetahs and other cat species, from leopards to domestic cats. They found that the vestibular system took up a much greater part of the inner ear in cheetahs than in any other cat. The cheetahs also had elongated semicircular canals, parts of the system involved in head movement and eye direction. These features help the animal catch dinner by letting it keep its head still and its eyes on the prize, even when the rest of its body is rapidly moving, the researchers write in Scientific Reports. The extinct giant cheetah did not have the same features, suggesting that the distinct vestibular system evolved fairly recently, they say. © 2018 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Hearing
Link ID: 24607 - Posted: 02.03.2018

Jon Hamilton When Sarah Jay had her first seizure, she was in her mid-20s and working a high-stress job at a call center in Springfield, Mo. "I was going to go on break," she says. "I was heading towards the bathroom and then I fell and passed out." An ambulance took Jay to the hospital but doctors there couldn't find anything wrong. Jay figured it was a one-time thing. Then a week later, she had another seizure. And that kept happening once or twice a week. "So I was put on short-term disability for my work to try to figure out what was going on," says Jay, who's now 29. The most likely cause for her seizures was abnormal electrical activity in her brain. In other words, epilepsy. But Jay's doctors wanted to be sure. In May 2013, they admitted her to a hospital epilepsy center, put electrodes on her scalp and began watching her brain activity. An epileptic seizure looks a bit like an electrical storm in the brain. Neurons begin to fire uncontrollably, which can cause patients to lose consciousness or have muscle spasms. But during Jay's seizures, her brain activity appeared completely normal. "It was kind of surreal," she says. "This woman, she sat me down and she was like, 'OK, you do not have epilepsy.' And I'm like, 'OK, so what's going on?' " The woman told Jay her seizures were the result of a psychological disorder called psychogenic non-epileptic seizures. PNES is a surprisingly common disorder, says John Stern, who directs the epilepsy clinical program at the University of California, Los Angeles. About 1 in 3 people who come to UCLA for uncontrolled seizures don't have epilepsy. Usually, they have PNES, he says. © 2018 npr

Keyword: Epilepsy; Stress
Link ID: 24606 - Posted: 02.02.2018

By Douglas Starr In 1987, Avshalom Caspi and Terrie Moffitt, two postdocs in psychology, had adjacent displays at the poster session of a conference in St. Louis, Missouri. Caspi, generally not a forward man, looked over at Moffitt's poster and was dazzled by her science. "You have the most beautiful data set," he said. Not one to be easily wooed, Moffitt went to the university library after the meeting and looked up Caspi's citations. Yep, he'd do. "It was very nerdy," Caspi recalls. "We fell in love over our data." It's been a personal and scientific love affair ever since. For nearly 30 years, Moffitt and Caspi have been collaborating on one of the more comprehensive and probing investigations of human development ever conducted. Launched in 1972, the Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study is as fundamental to human development as the Framingham Heart Study is to cardiovascular disease and the Nurses' Health Study is to women's health. From detailed observations of the life courses of about 1000 New Zealanders, Dunedin has spun out more than 1200 papers on questions from the risk factors for antisocial behavior and the biological outcomes of stress to the long-term effects of cannabis use. Moffitt, who joined the study in 1985, and Caspi, who followed, have led much of the work. They "have done so much it's impossible to pigeonhole them," says Brent Roberts, a psychologist at the University of Illinois in Champaign who has collaborated with the now-married couple. One early finding, on the transient nature of most juvenile criminality, was cited in the U.S. Supreme Court's 2005 decision to prohibit the execution of underage murderers. Moffitt and Caspi did pioneering research showing that self-control in early childhood predicts health and happiness in adults. © 2018 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 24605 - Posted: 02.02.2018

by William Wan Last year, the National Institutes of Health announced plans to tighten its rules for all research involving humans — including new requirements for scientists studying human behavior — and touched off a panic. Some of the country’s biggest scientific associations, including the American Psychological Association and Federation of Associations in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, penned impassioned letters over the summer warning that the new policies could slow scientific progress, increase red tape and present obstacles for researchers working in smaller labs with less financial and administrative resources to deal with the added requirements. More than 3,500 scientists signed an open letter to NIH director Francis Collins. The new rules are scheduled to take effect Thursday. They will have a big impact on how research is conducted, especially in fields like psychology and neuroscience. NIH distributes more than $32 billion each year, making it the largest public funder of biomedical and health research in the world, and the rules apply to any NIH-supported work that studies human subjects and is evaluating the effects of interventions on health or behavior. In the biggest change, many studies that investigators previously considered basic research will now be considered clinical trials. That means those studies will be subject to the same stringent rules and reporting requirements demanded of traditional clinical trials, such as those that test the efficacy and dangers of a new drug or medical procedure. © 1996-2018 The Washington Post

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 24604 - Posted: 02.02.2018

By Clare Wilson Just one in 10 babies exposed to the Zika virus during pregnancy get the brain damage that causes microcephaly – abnormally small heads. Now there’s a first clue about what stops this from happening in the rest – their gene activity. Blood samples were taken from three pairs of non-identical twins in Brazil. In each of these pairs, one baby had brain damage and the other didn’t. Stem cells were then made from their blood cells, and matured into brain cells, allowing researchers to see how the brain cells naturally differ between the twins. They found that, in the babies that developed microcephaly, the brain cells seem to innately make less of three particular proteins. The genes that encode these proteins are all known to be involved in normal neural development. When the team exposed these brain cells to Zika virus, they were also more susceptible to infection than ones made from the blood of their twins. Spreading to the US It may be possible to use this finding to develop a test for pregnant women that will tell them if their fetuses are particularly susceptible to Zika infection and microcephaly, says Mayana Zatz of the University of São Paulo in Brazil. Zika began causing an epidemic of brain damage in South America after it spread to the continent from Asia in 2013. But cases in Brazil dropped sharply last year, perhaps because most people there are now immune. © Copyright New Scientist Ltd.

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 24603 - Posted: 02.02.2018

By C. CLAIBORNE RAY Q. Does an octopus have a brain? Where is it? And just how smart is an octopus? A. In a sense, an octopus has several brains, collections of neurons that control each arm. A famous 2001 study in the journal Science described how the commands that control one arm’s movement continue even when connections to the walnut-sized central processing system in the head are severed. Since then, more has been found about why the octopus is so much smarter than the average seafood. Even the relatively small central brain of an octopus is the largest among all invertebrates — proportionally, that is. A review article in 2015 in the journal Current Opinion in Neurobiology summarized the complexity of learning processes in the octopus and its remarkable adaptability. Some studies have examined the cephalopod’s ability to discern objects of different sizes, shapes, colors, brightnesses and textures; and its problem-solving, including the ability to navigate mazes and open jars. The creature also displays both short-term and long-term memory and recall over periods of weeks and even months. A possible explanation of the advanced abilities of the octopus lies in its very large genome, decoded in 2015 in a study in the journal Nature. The researchers surmised that the vast expansion of certain gene families in the octopus, and the network of linkages among the genes, could account for the development of its neurological complexity. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Evolution; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 24602 - Posted: 02.02.2018

Jon Hamilton Scientists have found specialized brain cells in mice that appear to control anxiety levels. The finding, reported Wednesday in the journal Neuron, could eventually lead to better treatments for anxiety disorders, which affect nearly 1 in 5 adults in the U.S. "The therapies we have now have significant drawbacks," says Mazen Kheirbek, an assistant professor at the University of California, San Francisco and an author of the study. "This is another target that we can try to move the field forward for finding new therapies." But the research is at an early stage and lab findings in animals don't always pan out in humans. The discovery of anxiety cells is just the latest example of the "tremendous progress" scientists have made toward understanding how anxiety works in the brain, says Joshua Gordon, director of the National Institute of Mental Health, which helped fund the research. "If we can learn enough, we can develop the tools to turn on and off the key players that regulate anxiety in people," Gordon says. Anxiety disorders involve excessive worry that doesn't go away. These disorders include generalized anxiety disorder, panic disorder and social anxiety disorder. Kheirbek and a team including several researchers from Columbia University discovered the cells in the hippocampus, an area of the brain known to be involved in anxiety as well as navigation and memory. © 2018 npr

Keyword: Emotions; Stress
Link ID: 24601 - Posted: 02.01.2018

By Bret Stetka For the most part, clinical trials in Alzheimer’s disease have been woefully disappointing—failed drug after failed drug. Even colossal drugmaker Pfizer announced earlier this month that it will stop pursuing treatments for the disorder out of scientific and financial frustration. Yet a Japanese study published Jan. 31 in Nature reports on a screening test that could improve the success of Alzheimer’s drug research. The new findings suggest a simple blood test can accurately predict levels of a protein called amyloid beta in the brain that begins appearing early in the course of the disease before symptoms appear. Amyloid buildup is a key pathological feature of Alzheimer’s, and determining the degree to which someone’s brain is riddled with the molecule is essential for designing effective clinical trials. At the moment the only way to accurately measure amyloid in a living person is either via costly positron emission tomography imaging (PET scan) or by sampling cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) with a lumbar puncture, or spinal tap. A blood test would offer a cheaper, far less invasive means of determining a patient’s amyloid status. This could encourage more patients to enter clinical trials. It could also help researchers distinguish people with brewing Alzheimer’s from those with other forms of dementia. Senior study author Katsuhiko Yanagisawa, director general of the National Center for Geriatrics and Gerontology in Japan, is convinced that enough amyloid penetrates the blood–brain barrier to make its way into the bloodstream to be a useful measure of cognitive function. “We think amyloid blood tests could replace costly, invasive amyloid tests, especially when it comes to detecting preclinical Alzheimer’s,” he says. “We hope our biomarker better facilitates clinical trials for [Alzheimer’s] by improving enrollment of participants.” © 2018 Scientific American

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 24600 - Posted: 02.01.2018