Call it the engineer's version of probiotics. Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have engineered a device that combined bacteria and microelectronics to detect biological signals in the gut.
Deep brain stimulation (DBS) improved insulin sensitivity in multiple tissues in both diabetic and nondiabetic patients who were receiving DBS to treat obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), researchers reported in the May 23, 2018, issue of Science Translational Medicine.
Scientists from the Major Depressive Disorder Working Group of the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium and the Karolinska Institutet have mapped the effects of schizophrenia risk variants to a few specific cell types. Knowledge of the risk variants themselves has not yet led to obvious new targets for the disorder, in part because of the brain's large number of cell types.
Targeted complement inhibition was able to reduce inflammation and prevent the immune system from finishing off stressed neurons after stroke. The complement system is a part of the innate immune system, and one of its roles is to mark neuronal debris for cleanup in the brain.
The April announcement of a biomarker-based diagnosis for Alzheimer's disease by the National Institute of Aging (NIA) and the Alzheimer's Association (AA) came with assurances that their recommendations were meant as a "research framework to investigate the Alzheimer's disease continuum, not as diagnostic criteria and explicitly not intended for clinical use."
A team from the British University of Cambridge has identified a molecular link between cholesterol and amyloid beta aggregation that could explain why cholesterol processing pathways are implicated in Alzheimer's disease (AD) risk by genomewide association studies (GWAS).
