Posts tagged brain damage

Behind all the gore there’s a profound purpose: The scientists here are mapping the brain. And while conventional brain maps describe distinct anatomical areas, like the frontal lobes and the hippocampus many of which were first outlined in the 19th century the Allen Brain Atlas seeks to describe the cortex at the level of specific genes and individual neurons. Slices of tissue containing billions of brain cells will be analyzed to see which snippets of DNA are turned on in each cell.If the institute succeeds, its maps will help scientists decipher the function of the thousands of genes that help produce the human brain. For the first time, it will be possible to understand how such a complex object is assembled from a basic four letter code.

“The maps of the brain we currently have are like those antique maps people used to draw of the New World,” says Allan Jones, chief scientific officer at the Allen Institute. “We can see the crude outlines of the structure, but we have no idea what’s happening on the inside.” Jones is in charge of making sure the atlas gets finished. He wears starched button-up shirts and crisply pleated khakis, and he looks like the kind of guy who has a drawer full of bow ties. “Studying the brain now is like trying to navigate a vast city without any driving instructions,” he says. “You don’t know where you are, and you have no idea how to find what you’re looking for.”

When the project is completed in 2012, at an expected cost of $55 million, its data sets will list the roughly 20,000 genes that, switched on in the exact right place at the exact right time, give rise to this self aware tangle of neurons. I look forward to the insights from this project.

(Source: futurenow321)

Nootropic (new-tro-pik) is the term for supplements, also known as smart drugs, that improve brain function. They can be food substances like phenethylamine and L-Theanine, found in chocolate and green tea, respectively. Nootropics also include extracted and purified components of medicinal plants, as well as substances synthesized from chemical precursors, such as piracetam, the world’s first official nootropic (piracetam was created in 1964 in Belgium by a team of scientists whose leader, Dr. Corneliu E. Giurgea, coined the term). Since then piracetam has been widely used as a cognitive enhancer and to treat neurological diseases like Alzheimer’s.

(Source: futurenow321)

A new treatment helped rabbits born with cerebral palsy regain near-normal mobility, offering hope of a potential breakthrough in treating humans with the incurable disorder, researchers said Wednesday. 

The method, part of the growing field of nanomedicine, worked by delivering an anti-inflammatory drug directly into the damaged parts of the brain via tiny tree-like molecules known as dendrimers.

“The importance of this work is that it indicates that there is a window in time, immediately after birth, when neuroinflammation can be identified and when treatment with a nanodevice can reverse the features of cerebral palsy,” said co-author Roberto Romero, an obstetrician at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. 

Cerebral palsy affects about 750,000 children and adults in the United States, and its prevalence rate is about 3.3 per 1,000 births

(Source: futurenow321)