A report in this week's PNAS suggests that neurogenesis can occur in response to neurodegeneration in human brains. Principal author Richard Faull and colleagues at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, report that significantly more neuronal proliferation occurs...
Recent evidence has enhanced the image of astrocytes, suggesting these glial cells are a source for stem cells, and that they mop up Aβ. But online publications in this week's PNAS and Nature Neuroscience indicate that astrocytes also are a major impediment to...
Just grind some dehydrated blueberries into your people-chow and counteract the effects of aging and Alzheimer's disease on memory. That's one hypothesis we can take away from a recent study by Jim Joseph and colleagues...
In Alzheimer's disease (AD), the first significant damage to neurons may be the loss of proteins involved in long-term potentiation (LTP) and memory. So conclude Dave Morgan and colleagues from the University of South Florida, Tampa, and Incyte Genomics, Palo Alto, California, in the June 15 Journal of Neuroscience...
Synapses—those specialized junctions that facilitate transmission of action potentials between neurons—are composed of a myriad of highly sophisticated proteins. Some, like neurexins, have yet to be fully characterized...
In this month's Nature Cell Biology, Frank Lezoualc'h and colleagues at the University of South Paris report that serotonin, or 5-hydroxy tryptamine (5HT), mediates sAPPα release through a cyclic AMP (cAMP) signaling pathway independent of protein kinase A (PKA)...
In the 24 June PNAS Early Edition, researchers report that a biologically ancient defense mechanism for ridding the central nervous system (CNS) of invading pathogens also damages neurons...
Soon after the World Health Organization bestowed its approval on the protein 14-3-3 as an important diagnostic marker for sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (sCJD), reports began to come in that its sensitivity and specificity might not be all that was advertised...
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has given approval for the drug Stalevo—a cocktail of levodopa (L-dopa), carbidopa, and entacapone—to be marketed in the United States for the treatment of Parkinson's disease...
The blood-brain barrier (BBB) is cropping up with increasing frequency in discussions of Alzheimer's disease therapy. It is an ever-present concern for researchers hoping to introduce therapies...
The not-for-profit Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis-Therapy Development Foundation (ALS-TDF), based in Newton, Massachusetts, has entered into a collaboration with University of Chicago stem cell researcher Kimonobu Sugaya...