fixaging

Repairing brain damage has come one step closer. As a Swiss research team discovered that an animals brain cells, can be used to replace neurons which have degenerated in primates who have simulated asymptomatic Parkinson’s disease, providing a degree of protection for the brain and even potentially being useful in brain damage and in restoring function to the brain. The adult monkey brain cells, were obtained from cortical biopsy and kept in culture for a few weeks.

“We aimed at determining whether auto grafted cells derived from cortical grey matter, cultured for one month and re-implanted in the caudate nucleus of dopamine depleted primates, effectively survived and migrated,” was said by Dr. Jean-Francoise Brunet who, with colleagues, published the study in Cell Transplantation (18:7) (freely available). “The autologous, re-implanted cells survived at an impressively high rate of 50 percent for four months post-implantation.”.

The usage of neural grafts to improve function post lesions or degeneration of the central nervous system has already been discovered, however, this study indicated that it is possible to replace depleted neurons in a restricted brain area and to negate any of the controversies accompanying fetal cell transplants as well as immune rejection which hamper progress.

Researchers saw that the new cells migrated, re-implanted into the right caudate nucleus, and went through the corpus callosum reaching the contralateral striatum. The cells were found in the dopamine depleted region of the caudate nucleus. This study was replicated in primates with the same success that the research team had reported using laboratory mice. According to the researchers, the cultured cells exhibited neural progenitor characteristics which may make them useful for brain repair which would be needed after brain damage. “Our results confirm that adult brain cells can be obtained, cryopreserved and kept in culture before being re-implanted in the donor where they survive in vivo for at least four months,” said Dr. Brunet and colleagues.

This procedure gives hope that brain damage can be reversed, as to keep a body fit and healthy it is not only required to maintain but also to be able to enact repairs in case of accidents.

Tags: Regenerative medicine by Matias
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Stanford Interleukin Genetics found that the best method of losing weight is dependant on genes. This may explain part of the reason why some people have a good effect with a certain method of weight loss and others have no effect or even a negative effect. I would expect as we progress that there will be more genetic tests which will help to determine what are the effective drugs and exercise as well as diet plan to extend someone’s life as long as possible.

The key findings of Stanford were:

• Individuals on genotype-appropriate diets lost 5.3% of their body weight as compared to the people on diets not matched to their genotype, they experienced a 2.3 percent weight loss (p=0.005).
• The weight loss was even stronger when you consider that the individuals who were trying to follow the lowest carbohydrate (Atkins) and the lowest fat (Ornish) diets: 6.8% weight loss for those whose genotype matched vs. 1.4% for those not matched to their genotype (p=0.03);
• The statistical significance of the findings increased when taking the dietary habits of the participants, as opposed to the specific diet they were asked to follow.
• Other improvements in measures related to weight loss were found, for example blood triglyceride levels paralleled the weight loss changes.

Found this information via futurepundit

Tags: Uncategorized by Matias
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It has been found that a medical instrument known as a PIB-PET can detect amyloid-beta protein deposits. These deposits are linked with Alzheimer’s and many believe that they are the cause of Alzheimer’s. The deposits do predict who will develop the Alzheimer’s disease.

The findings are the result of a survey of over 100 studies which use the instrument, these confirm the sensitivity of the PIB-PET tool. It is a great leap forward as previous to this it was only possible to detect the deposits of Amyloid by autopsy.

Helpfully the study also helps to strengthen the evidence supporting the amyloid hypothesis. This is the theory that it is the accumulation of the amyloid-beta protein plaques within the brain which causes the disease to occur. There are several important pieces of evidence that tend to refute the amyloid theory, these are that amyloid deposits do not correlate with how strongly the disease shows itself, and they are also found within people who did not have any Alzheimer’s symptoms., and that drugs which remove this plaque from the brain have had poor results in helping Alzheimer’s sufferers.

Co-author Gil Rabinovici is quoted as saying “Our survey of PIB-PET studies, which looked cross-sectionally and longitudinally at people with normal cognitive performance, mild cognitive impairment and full-fledged Alzheimer’s disease, showed that amyloid deposits can be detected in a significant proportion of cognitively normal older adults, and that their presence is associated with Alzheimer’s-like brain atrophy and changes in brain activity,”. He is assistant professor of neurology in the UCSF Memory and Aging Center.

The study indicated that more elderly individuals with amyloid deposits were more likely to show the cognitive decline which is associated with Alzheimer’s than their “amyloid-negative” counterparts.

The results of this study were reported in the journal Behavioral Neurology (vol. 21, Issues 1-2, 2009), and it could explain why it is that patients with Alzheimer’s disease have not responded to promising experimental drugs that target amyloid, as it could be that the drugs need to be administered earlier to be effective. This is because the Amyloid deposits could be doing there damage silently to start with and by the time that symptoms are appearing the damage could already have been done. So this suggest that by having and using the PIB-PET tool to diagnose Alzheimer’s early it could mean that the drugs can be used to reduce the accumulation of Amyloid and ultimately stop someone from getting Alzheimer’s

The current crop of drugs (e.g. Aricept, Exelon and Razadyne) only target the symptoms they do not help with the underlying cause of the disease. While many treatments which are currently under development, focus on the amyloid deposits in an attempt to arrest further decline. However currently, these treatments have failed to provide useful results two phase III clinical trials with mild-to-moderate Alzheimer’s disease.

The PIB-PET instrument procedure involves injecting a tracer material called Pittsburgh compound B (PIB) into the brain by the bloodstream, then the brain is imaged with positron emission tomography (PET). The PIB compound will bind to amyloid-beta protein plaques, and send a signal which can then be detected by the PET scanner and shown as an image.

Unfortunately these technique are still very much in the early stages and are not ready to be used on individuals who do not suffer from the effects of Alzheimer’s, as the benefits of this treatment have not been demonstrated in clinical trials.

Tags: Alzheimer's by Matias
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