Monthly Archives: May 2013

In an initial, randomized controlled study on elderly subjects with increased dementia risk (mild cognitive impairment according to 2004 Petersen criteria), the authors of this study found that high-dose B-vitamin treatment (folic acid 0.8 mg, vitamin B6 20 mg, vitamin … Continue reading

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Increasing evidence suggests that synaptic dysfunction is a key pathophysiological hallmark in neurodegenerative disorders, including Alzheimer’s disease. Understanding the role of brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) in synaptic plasticity and synaptogenesis, the impact of the BDNF Val66Met polymorphism in Alzheimer’s disease-relevant … Continue reading

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High-resolution imaging of biological tissue has traditionally required sectioning, which for tissues like the brain means the loss of long-range connectivity. Now Karl Deisseroth and colleagues have developed a way of making full, intact organs optically transparent and macromolecule-permeable by … Continue reading

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  Dopamine replacement via L-Dopa is the main current therapeutic strategy for Parkinson’s disease. The motor response to therapy involves an immediate improvement in motor function, known as the short-duration response (SDR), followed by a long-duration response (LDR) that develops … Continue reading

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“From the sky, I saw something like a bronze statue, a big bronze statue,” the drowsy man told neuroscientists as he lay inside an MRI machine that moments earlier had been recording his brain activity as he dozed. “The bronze … Continue reading

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One of the least-understood aspects of ageing is its coordinated and stereotyped progression in all organ systems. In this paper, Zhang and colleagues document the integration of inflammatory responses with systemic control of ageing by the hypothalamus. The hypothalamus is … Continue reading

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The hippocampus is critical for episodic memory and computational studies have predicted specific functions for each hippocampal subregion. Particularly, the dentate gyrus is hypothesized to perform pattern separation by forming distinct representations of similar inputs. How pattern separation is achieved … Continue reading

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