Neurology
Growth Factor Reverses Alzheimer’s-Like Signs in Animals
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Memory loss, cognitive impairment, brain cell degeneration and cell death were prevented or reversed in several animal models after treatment with a naturally occurring protein called brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF). The study by a University of California, San Diego-led team – published in the February 8, 2009 issue of Nature Medicine – shows that BDNF treatment can potentially provide long-lasting protection by slowing, or even stopping the progression of Alzheimer’s disease in animal models.
“The effects of BDNF were potent,” said Mark Tuszynski, MD, PhD, professor of neurosciences at the UC San Diego School of Medicine and neurologist at the Veterans Affairs San Diego Health System. “When we administered BDNF to memory circuits in the brain, we directly stimulated their activity and prevented cell death from the underlying disease.”
BDNF is normally produced throughout life in the entorhinal cortex, a portion of the brain that supports memory. Its production decreases in the presence of Alzheimer’s disease. For these experiments, the researchers injected the BDNF gene or protein in a series of cell culture and animal models, including transgenic mouse models of Alzheimer’s disease; aged rats; rats with induced damage to the entorhinal cortex; aged rhesus monkeys, and monkeys with entorhinal cortex damage.
Magnesium sulfate can lower risk of cerebral palsy
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Among women who are at risk of delivering prematurely, treatment with magnesium sulfate reduces the risk of cerebral palsy in the offspring.
“For infants born very premature, there is a high risk of cerebral palsy,” study co-author Dr. Caroline Crowther, from the University of Adelaide, Australia, said in a statement. “This new Cochrane review shows there is now evidence to support giving magnesium sulfate therapy to women at risk of very preterm birth to increase their unborn baby’s chance of survival, free of cerebral palsy.”
Using data from five clinical trials involving 6145 infants who were randomly assigned to treatment of magnesium sulphate or placebo around the time of delivery, the researchers found that magnesium sulphate cut the risk of cerebral palsy by 32 percent. Moreover, treatment was also tied to a 39-percent drop in the rate of major movement disabilities.
UCSB scientists make headway in understanding Alzheimer’s disease
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Scientists at UC Santa Barbara have discovered that a protein called BAG2 is important for understanding Alzheimer’s disease and may open up new targets for drug discovery. They are ready to move from studying these proteins in culture to finding out how they work with mice.
In a paper published this week in the Journal of Neuroscience, the scientists describe important activities of BAG2 in cleaning up brain cells. The protein tau is normally found in brain cells, but scientists don’t know why it clumps into tangles in people with Alzheimer’s disease.
Senior author Kenneth S. Kosik, co-director of UCSB’s Neuroscience Research Institute, and Harriman Chair in Neuroscience, has been involved in the study of neurons that develop neurofibrillary tangles, one of the hallmarks of the disease, since he was a postdoctoral fellow. “Early on in my career, we were one of several labs to discover that tau was in the neurofibrillary tangles,” said Kosik.
Education doesn’t prevent cognitive decline
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Although a higher level of education attainment is associated with a higher level of cognitive functioning, it does not protect against cognitive decline in old age, contrary to the results of some reports, according to a study sponsored by the U.S. National Institutes of Health.
The association between higher educational attainment and reduced cognitive decline is based largely on studies that measured change at two points in time, study co-author, Dr. Robert S. Wilson, told Reuters Health.
“These studies have had difficulty separating education’s correlation with level of cognition from its correlation with rate of change. Studies such as ours that measure cognition at three or more time points are better able to separate these effects,” he said.
Pregnancy-related hormonal changes linked to increased risk of restless legs syndrome
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A study in the Feb. 1 issue of the journal Sleep shows that the elevation in estradiol levels that occurs during pregnancy is more pronounced in pregnant women with restless legs syndrome (RLS) than in controls.
During the last trimester of pregnancy, levels of the estrogenic steroid hormone estradiol were 34,211 pg/mL in women with RLS and 25,475 pg/mL in healthy controls. At three months postpartum, estradiol levels had dropped to 30.73 pg/mL in the RLS group and 94.92 pg/mL in controls. Other hormone levels did not differ significantly between the study groups.
According to the authors the data strongly suggest that estrogens play an important role in RLS during pregnancy. The study also supports previous reports of high RLS incidence in the last trimester of pregnancy when estradiol is maximally elevated.
Canada-US scientists discover gene responsible for brain’s aging
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Will scientists one day be able to slow the aging of the brain and prevent diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s? Absolutely – once the genetic coding associated with neuronal degeneration has been unraveled.
According to a new study published in The Journal of Neuroscience, a research team from the Université de Montréal, Maisonneuve-Rosemont Hospital and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has taken a giant step in this direction by identifying a gene that controls the normal and pathological aging of neurons in the central nervous system: Bmi1.
The primary risk factor for diseases such as macular degeneration, Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s is age. Although many researchers have sought to better understand the genetics and pathophysiology of these diseases, few studies have focused on the basic molecular mechanisms that control neuronal aging.
Cell ‘anchors’ required to prevent muscular dystrophy
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A protein that was first identified for playing a key role in regulating normal heart rhythms also appears to be significant in helping muscle cells survive the forces of muscle contraction. The clue was a laboratory mouse that seemed to have a form of muscular dystrophy.
A group of proteins called ankyrins, or anchor proteins, were first discovered in human red blood cells by Vann Bennett, M.D. a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator and James B. Duke Professor of Cell Biology, Biochemistry, and Neurobiology. Ankyrins are a family of proteins that assist in attaching other proteins to the fragile cell membrane, and in the case of red blood cells, this helps cells resist shearing forces when blood is pumped vigorously throughout the body.
Bennett’s team was exploring the function of anchor protein ankyrin-B (ankB) by knocking out gene expression of the gene that makes the protein. They found newborn mice missing ankB had splayed shoulder bones, which stuck out of the animals’ backs like wings, rather than lying flat, a symptom of a muscular problem.
Alzheimer’s: Who’s Taking Care of the Caregiver?
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About 300,000 Canadians over 65 suffer from Alzheimer’s disease, and 17% of Canadians have someone with the disease in their family, according to the Alzheimer Society of Canada. People who suffer from Alzheimer’s usually receive long-term help and support from caregivers. But who is taking care of these caregivers? Researchers are finding ways to help caregivers stay mentally and physically healthy, overcome their challenges, and better understand the disease.
Several experts from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) are available to comment on different aspects related to the health issues experienced by caregivers of Alzheimer’s patients on January 13.
Experts:
Preventing distress in Alzheimer’s caregivers
Smoking ups brain-bleed risk with family history
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Smokers whose family members have had a type of bleeding stroke are six times more likely to suffer the same fate than people without these risk factors, according to a new study.
The stroke type known as an “aneurysmal subarachnoid hemorrhage”—essentially a burst blood vessel in the brain—runs in families, note Dr. Daniel Woo and others in the medical journal Neurology, and they wanted to see if smoking added to the hereditary risk.
Their study, funded by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, compared 339 patients with aneurysmal subarachnoid hemorrhage with 1016 “controls” without the condition, matched by age, race and gender.
Study finds favorable trends in stroke
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Fewer people are suffering stroke and fewer people are dying from stroke, new research from Sweden hints.
To varying degrees, there have been improvements in the incidence of stroke and in stroke deaths among both diabetic and non-diabetic adults, Dr. Aslak Rautio and colleagues from Umea University report in the journal Stroke.
The researchers used data from a Swedish stroke registry to compare time trends in incidence, case-fatality, and death in stroke patients with or without diabetes. All strokes in patients 35 to 74 years old were registered from January 1, 1985, and December 31, 2003.
Rare sleep disorder may be a harbinger of dementia
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More than half of people with a rare sleep disorder develop a neurodegenerative disease, such as Parkinson’s disease, within 12 years of being diagnosed, results of a Canadian study published Wednesday indicate.
So-called “REM sleep behaviour disorder” affects a small percentage of the population, Dr. Ronald B. Postuma, at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, and colleagues explain in the journal Neurology. It is characterized by a loss of the normal muscle relaxation while dreaming and is seen most often in men aged 50 and older. REM sleep behaviour disorder should not be confused with insomnia, night terrors, or confusional arousals.
Small studies have identified REM sleep behavior disorder as a risk factor for Parkinson’s disease and dementia. To investigate further, Postuma’s team conducted a follow-up study of 93 patients diagnosed with unexplained REM sleep behavior disorder between 1989 and 2006. The average time from diagnosis to last evaluation was 5.2 years.
High-dose supplements may improve stroke rehab
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People who are undernourished after suffering a stroke benefit from intensive dietary supplementation during rehabilitation, according to results of a pilot study conducted at the Burke Rehabilitation Hospital in New York.
Dr. M. H. Rabadi, currently at the VA Medical Center in Oklahoma City, and associates compared intensive and routine nutritional supplementation in 102 undernourished patients admitted within 4 weeks of having a stroke. All had unintentionally lost at least 2.5 percent of their body weight.
The “standard” supplement was Resource Standard, containing 127 calories, 5 grams of protein, and 36 milligrams of vitamin C per dose; the “intensive” supplement was Novasource 2.0 containing 240 calories, 11 grams of protein, and 90 milligrams of vitamin C per dose. Both supplements, made by Novartis Pharmaceuticals, were given every 8 hours along with multivitamins with minerals, in addition to the normal diet.
Personal rehab helpful for multiple sclerosis
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Results of a study in the Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery, and Psychiatry suggest that an individualized rehabilitation program effectively reduces disability in patients with multiple sclerosis (MS).
“Persons with MS are expected to have a normal lifespan and live for many decades with a range of problems,” Dr. Fary Khan, of the University of Melbourne, Australia, and colleagues write.
In order to assess the effectiveness of rehabilitation in MS patients, the researchers conducted a study with 101 patients who were randomly assigned to an individualized program or standard care.
Obesity, other health problems delay MS diagnosis
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People with pre-existing medical conditions, such as obesity, and vascular problems such as diabetes, high blood pressure or high cholesterol, may experience a delay in being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis (MS), or experience an increase in severity of the disease at diagnosis, according to a study published in the October 29, 2008, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.
“Our study suggests that doctors who treat people with chronic diseases should not attribute new neurological symptoms such as numbness and tingling to existing conditions without careful consideration,” said study author Ruth Ann Marrie, MD, PhD, of the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada, and member of the American Academy of Neurology.
For the study, researchers examined the records of 8,983 people who had been diagnosed with MS. Of those, 2,375 were further classified as having mild, moderate or severe disability within two years of diagnosis. This well-characterized group was asked about pre-existing health conditions, their smoking status and weight history.
Physical activity may lessen stroke severity
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How active a person is before having a stroke predicts how severe the stroke will be and how well he or she recovers, Danish researchers have found.
Dr. Lars-Henrik Krarup, from Copenhagen University Hospital, and colleagues looked at 265 people who had suffered a first stroke. After factoring in age, history of diabetes and other conditions, those patients with high pre-stroke physical activity scores were more likely to have a less severe stroke, the team reports in the medical journal Neurology.
Likewise, the outcome after two years was substantially better in patients in the highest ranking for physical activity.
