A groundbreaking study suggests that Parkinson’s disease may begin in the kidneys, where a toxic protein builds up and travels to the brain. This discovery could reshape our understanding of the disease’s origins and risk factors.
Category: neuroscience – Page 18
Alzheimer’s: Bacteria that cause stomach ulcers may also protect brain
Every three seconds, someone in the world develops dementia. Alzheimer’s disease is the most common form of dementia, accounting for between 60% and 70% of all cases.
Although scientists have made significant progress in understanding the disease, there’s still no cure. That’s partly because Alzheimer’s disease has multiple causes—many of which are still not fully understood.
Two proteins which are widely believed to play central roles in Alzheimer’s disease are amyloid-beta and tau. Amyloid-beta forms sticky plaques on the outside of brain cells. This disrupts communication between neurons. Tau accumulates inside brain cells, where it twists into tangles. This ultimately leads to cell death. These plaques and tangles are the hallmark features of Alzheimer’s disease.
Scientists find cellular brain changes tied to PTSD
The human brain is made up of billions of interconnected cells that are constantly talking to each other. A new study published in Nature zooms in to the single-cell level to see how this cellular communication may be going wrong in brains affected by post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
Until recently, researchers did not have the technology to study genetic variation within individual cells. But now that it’s available, a team led by Matthew Girgenti, Ph.D., assistant professor of psychiatry at Yale School of Medicine, has been analyzing brain cells to uncover genetic variants that might be associated with psychiatric diseases such as major depressive disorder (MDD) and PTSD.
Their latest study is one of the first to examine a major psychiatric disorder, PTSD, at the single-cell level. For years, doctors have been prescribing antidepressants to treat the condition because there are currently no drugs specifically designed for PTSD. Girgenti hopes that identifying novel molecular signatures associated with the psychiatric disease can help researchers learn how to develop new drugs or repurpose existing ones to treat it more effectively.
Brain organizes visuomotor associations into structured graph-like mental schemes, study finds
Graphs, visual representations outlining the relationships between different entities, concepts or variables, can be very effective in summarizing complex patterns and information. Past psychology studies suggest that the human brain stores memories and experiences following graph-like and structured patterns, specifically as a network of associations, also referred to as cognitive graphs.
These cognitive graphs are hypothesized to represent different concepts as “nodes” and the relationships between these concepts as edges connecting these nodes. By organizing information in a structured way, they can allow people to apply knowledge they have acquired in the past to new situations and draw conclusions about what is happening based on previous experiences.
The role of cognitive graphs has been widely investigated in the past, with most studies focusing on their contribution to the storage and retrieval of facts and knowledge (i.e., declarative memories). In contrast, the extent to which they influence the planning and control of movements remains poorly understood.
Circadian photoreception influences loss aversion
Scientific Reports volume 15, Article number: 13,051 (2025) Cite this article.
