Some of the most devastating health effects of a stroke or heart attack are caused by oxygen deprivation in the brain. Now, researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) have identified an enzyme that may naturally protect the brain from oxygen deprivation damage, which could be a potential drug target to prevent issues arising from strokes or heart attacks.
Like many scientific breakthroughs, the new discovery came about while investigating something else entirely. The team was looking into a study from 2005 that found that a state of “suspended animation” could be induced in mice by having them inhale hydrogen sulfide. In the new study, the researchers set out to investigate the longer-term effects of that exposure.
The team exposed groups of mice to hydrogen sulfide for four hours a day, for five consecutive days. The suspended animation-like state followed, with the animals’ movement slowing and body temperatures dropping.
The biological clock is present in almost all cells of an organism. As more and more evidence emerges that clocks in certain organs could be out of sync, there is a need to investigate and reset these clocks locally. Scientists from the Netherlands and Japan introduced a light-controlled on/off switch to a kinase inhibitor, which affects clock function. This gives them control of the biological clock in cultured cells and explanted tissue. They published their results on 26 May in Nature Communications.
Life on Earth has evolved under a 24-hour cycle of light and dark, hot and cold. “As a result, our cells are synchronized to these 24-hour oscillations,” says Wiktor Szymanski, Professor of Radiological Chemistry at the University Medical Center Groningen. Our circadian clock is regulated by a central controller in the suprachiasmatic nucleus, a region in the brain directly above the optic nerve, but all our cells contain a clock of their own. These clocks consist of an oscillation in the production and breakdown of certain proteins.
Summary: A “flicker treatment” that uses flickering lights and sounds has been shown to be tolerable, safe, and effective in treating adults with mild cognitive impairment.
Source: Georgia Tech.
For the past few years, Annabelle Singer and her collaborators have been using flickering lights and sound to treat mouse models of Alzheimer’s disease, and they’ve seen some dramatic results.
Summary: The reactivation of learned material during slow oscillation/sleep spindle complexes, and the precision of SO-spindle coupling predicts how strong a memory will be reactivated in the brain.
Source: University of Birmingham.
While we sleep, the brain produces particular activation patterns. When two of these patterns – slow oscillations and sleep spindles – gear into each other, previous experiences are reactivated. The stronger the reactivation, the clearer will be our recall of past events, a new study reveals.
Summary: A new algorithm that uses data from memory tests and blood samples is able to accurately predict an individual’s risk for developing Alzheimer’s disease.
Source: Lund University.
Researchers at Lund University in Sweden have developed an algorithm that combines data from a simple blood test and brief memory tests, to predict with great accuracy who will develop Alzheimer’s disease in the future.
Senior director, milken institute center for the future of aging, milken institute; executive director, alliance to improve dementia care.
Nora Super is the Senior Director of the Milken Institute Center for the Future of Aging (CFA) (https://milkeninstitute.org/centers/center-for-the-future-of-aging) and the Executive Director of the Milken Institute Alliance to Improve Dementia Care (https://milkeninstitute.org/centers/center-for-the-future-of-aging/alliance-to-improve-dementia-care).
Mr. Super provides strategic direction for the two primary focus areas of CFA: Financial Wellness and Healthy Longevity, and oversees data-driven research, meaningful policy initiatives, and impactful convenings around the world.
Launched in 2020, the Alliance to Improve Dementia Care seeks to transform and improve the complex health and long-term care systems that people at risk for and living with dementia must navigate.
Ms. Super studied political science at Tulane University and completed her master’s degree in public administration, with a concentration in health policy, at George Washington University, and is a respected thought leader, frequent speaker, and prolific writer on healthy longevity and the economic and social impact of global population aging. In 2019, she authored two major reports: “Reducing the Cost and Risk of Dementia: Recommendations to Improve Brain Health and Decrease Disparities” and “Age-Forward Cities for 2030.”
Before joining the Milken Institute, Ms. Super held several key leadership roles in the public and private sectors. In 2014, President Barack Obama appointed Ms. Super Executive Director of the White House Conference on Aging, where she received wide recognition for her nationwide efforts to improve the lives of older Americans. In 2015, Ms. Super was recognized as one of America’s top 50 “Influencers in Aging” by PBS Next Avenue and was the Honoree for Outstanding Service to Medicare Beneficiaries by the Medicare Rights Center.
Ms. Super has also held leadership roles at the US Department of Health and Human Services, AARP, Kaiser Permanente, and the National Association of Area Agencies on Aging.
Ms. Super serves on several boards, including the Long-Term Quality Alliance, the Brain Health Partnership Advisory Board, the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Advisory Committee on Improving Care Delivery for Individuals with Serious Illness, the Better Medicare Alliance Beneficiary Education Technical Advisory Council, the Brookings Institution and Kellogg School of Management Retirement Security Advisory Board, Columbia University Medical Center’s Health and Aging Policy Fellows Program Steering Committee, Retirement Income Institute’s Scholars Advisory Group, and Gerontological Society of America’s Policy and Aging Report Editorial Board and Reframing Aging Initiative Advisory Board.
Researchers identify a mechanism that could lead to new treatments for brain injuries caused by oxygen deprivation.
In a surprising discovery, researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) identified a mechanism that protects the brain from the effects of hypoxia, a potentially lethal deprivation of oxygen. This serendipitous finding, which they report in Nature Communications, could aid in the development of therapies for strokes, as well as brain injury that can result from cardiac arrest, among other conditions.
However, this study began with a very different objective, explains senior author Fumito Ichinose, MD, PhD, an attending physician in the Department of Anesthesia, Critical Care and Pain Medicine at MGH, and principal investigator in the Anesthesia Center for Critical Care Research. One area of focus for Ichinose and his team is developing techniques for inducing suspended animation, that is, putting a human’s vital functions on temporary hold, with the ability to “reawaken” them later. This state of being would be similar to what bears and other animals experience during hibernation. Ichinose believes that the ability to safely induce suspended animation could have valuable medical applications, such as pausing the life processes of a patient with an incurable disease until an effective therapy is found. It could also allow humans to travel long distances in space (which has frequently been depicted in science fiction).
A new study from the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience (IoPPN) at King’s College London has established that Intermittent Fasting (IF) is an effective means of improving long term memory retention and generating new adult hippocampal neurons in mice, in what the researchers hope has the potential to slow the advance of cognitive decline in older people.
The study, published today in Molecular Biology, found that a calorie restricted diet via every other day fasting was an effective means of promoting Klotho gene expression in mice. Klotho, which is often referred to as the “longevity gene” has now been shown in this study to play a central role in the production of hippocampal adult-born new neurons or neurogenesis.
Adult-born hippocampal neurons are important for memory formation and their production declines with age, explaining in part cognitive decline in older people.
Is this the reason why the general public view the emerging field of regenerative medicine with such scepticism? Has a combined cultural history of being bombarded with empty promises of longevity made us numb to such a prospect? Possibly, although I believe it might go deeper than old fashioned scepticism. After all, our species is hardly a stranger to believing something if we desire for it to be true, regardless of how much evidence is presented to us.
Maybe we are simply experiencing just another example of humans finding dramatic change to our way of life hard to comprehend and accept. After all, practically every major change in our recent history was largely believed to be an impossibility by the general public, right up until the point that it became the norm. Everything from the aeroplane to the internet was seen as science fiction, but yet today they are integral parts of our lives. Now, this is not to say that everything the general public is sceptical of will inevitably turn out to prove them wrong, but lessons from our history do show that when it comes to scientific progress, the public will not believe it until they can see it.
Some would believe that scepticism towards regenerative medicine strikes at something much deeper in our psych, as it threatened to fundamentally change our entire outlook on the world. For our entire lives, we have been taught by our interactions with others exactly how life is supposed to progress. You are supposed to suffer a gradual decay of mental and physical abilities, until eventually you die. That is just how it is, and if that were to ever change then we would all have to change how we think about the world. The concept of a 125 year old with the appearance of a 25 year old seems bizarre to us right now, and to many the idea of ever lasting health just goes against their fundamental beliefs of how the world functions to such an extent that they cannot comprehend anything different. Some would even go far as to defend the ageing process as being an integral part of life, displaying what can only be described as ‘Stockholm syndrome with extra steps’.
3D printing, also called additive manufacturing, has become widespread in recent years. By building successive layers of raw material such as metals, plastics, and ceramics, it has the key advantage of being able to produce very complex shapes or geometries that would be nearly impossible to construct through more traditional methods such as carving, grinding, or molding.
The technology offers huge potential in the health care sector. For example, doctors can use it to make products to match a patient’s anatomy: a radiologist could create an exact replica of a patient’s spine to help plan surgery; a dentist could scan a patient’s broken tooth to make a perfectly fitting crown reproduction. But what if we took a step further and apply 3D printing techniques to neuroscience?
Stems cells are essentially the body’s raw materials; they are pluripotent elements from which all other cells with specialized functions are generated. The development of methods to isolate and generate human stem cells, has excited many with the promise of improved human cell function understanding, ultimately utilizing them for regeneration in disease and trauma. However, the traditional two-dimensional growth of derived neurones–using flat petri dishes–presents itself as a major confounding factor as it does not adequately mimic in vivo three-dimensional interactions, nor the myriad developmental cues present in real living organisms.
To address this limitation in current neuronal culturing approaches, the FET funded MESO-BRAIN project, led by Aston University, proposed a highly ambitious interdisciplinary enterprise to construct truly 3D networks that not only displayed in vivo activity patterns of neural cultures but also allowed for precise interaction with these cultures. This allows the activity of individual elements to be readily monitored and controlled through electrical stimulation.
The ability to develop human-induced pluripotent stem cell derived neural networks upon a defined and reproducible 3D scaffold that can emulate brain activity, allows for a comprehensive and detailed investigation of neural network development.
The MESO-BRAIN project facilitates a better understanding of human disease progression, neuronal growth and enables the development of large-scale human cell-based assays to test the modulatory effects of pharmacological and toxicological compounds on neural network activity. This can ultimately help to better understand and treat neurological conditions such as Parkinson’s disease, dementia, and trauma. In addition, the use of more physiologically relevant human models will increase drug screening efficiency and reduce the need for animal testing.
