Dopamine leads to over-eating and eventually weight gain

Pleasure and timing are interlinked, not only in life but in our body as well, finds a recent study. The brain’s pleasure sector has an integrated connection with the human biological clock.

Thus, high-calorie food, which makes one happy and content, can disturb one’s regular schedule without even being noticed before it’s too late. As a result, overweight and obesity are a compulsion.

But that is not all that comes with happiness through overeating. One can be prone to diabetes, heart diseases, hypertension and even cancer due to ill-eating habits.

According to the study, the eating pattern in the United States has worsened in the past 50 years.

“With highly processed foods readily and cheaply available at any time of the day or night,” Ali Guler, a professor of biology at the University of Virginia, said.

“Many of these foods are high in sugars, carbohydrates, and calories, which makes for an unhealthy diet when consumed regularly over many years.”

Guler and his co-workers, in the study published in Current Biology on Thursday, described that the portion of our brain that excretes dopamine and the other part determining the human clock are synced.

Guel and his team had used mice to conduct the study and reach such result.

“We’ve shown that dopamine signalling in the brain governs circadian biology and leads to consumption of energy-dense foods between meals and during odd hours,” said Guler.  this is only for your information, kindly take the advice of your doctor for medicines, exercises and so on.     

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Researchers develop robotic thread that may slip through brain's blood vessels

Researchers have developed a magnetically steerable, thread-like robot that may actively glide through narrow, winding pathways like the brain's tiny blood vessels. The study, revealed that the magnetically controlled device could one day deliver clot-reducing therapies in response to strokes or other brain blockages.

If acute stroke can be treated within the 1st 90 minutes or so, patients' survival rates could increase significantly, the researcher said.

If we could design a device to reverse blood vessel blockage within this ' golden hour', we could potentially avoid permanent brain damage. That's our hope. To clear blood clots in the brain, surgeons currently need to insert a thin wire through a patient's main artery, usually in the leg or groin, and manually rotate the wire up into the damaged brain vessel, guided  by a fluroscope that images the blood vessels using x-rays.

However, the procedure is physically taxing, requiring surgeons who must be specifically trained in the task, to endure repeated radiation exposure.

The researchers created a robotic thread core made from bendy, springy nickel-titanium alloy, and they coated the wire core in a rubbery paste filled with magnetic particles.

They then bonded the magnetic covering with a kind of hydrogel that gives the thread a slippery, friction-free surface, but does not affect the responsiveness or the magnetic particles, according to the study.

The researchers tested the thread in a life-size silicone replica of the brain's major blood vessels modeled after scanning an actual patient's brain. Those silicone vessels also have clots and abnormal sacs.

They filled the vessels with a liquid simulating the viscosity of blood, then successfully manipulated a large magnet around the model to steer the robot through the vessels' winding, narrow paths.

The team demonstrated that the thread's wire core can also be replaced with an optical fibre that can activate the laser once the robot reached a target region to clear blockages.

They are preparing to test the robotic thread in vivo, according to the researchers.

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BP pill has potential to slow down Alzheimer's

A high blood pressure drug has the potential to slow down Alzheimer's disease by improving the flow of blood to parts of the brain linked to memory, a study suggests.

Researchers found the drug nilvadipine increased blood flow to the brain's memory and learning centre among people with Alzheimer's without affecting other parts of the brain.

The findings indicate that the known decrease in cerebral blood flow in patients with Alzheimer's can be reversed in some regions.

However, an important question is whether this observed increase in cerebral blood flow translates to clinical benefits, the researchers said.

Alzheimer's disease is the most common form of dementia.

The risk for the disease increases with age and the causes are largely unknown.

Previous research has shown that blood flow to the brain declines in early Alzheimer's disease.
Nilvadipine is a calcium channel blocker used to treat high blood pressure.

Researchers sought to discover whether nilvadipine could help treat Alzheimer's disease by comparing the use of nilvadipine and a placebo among people with mild to moderate Alzheimer's disease.

They randomly assigned 44 participants to receive either nilvadipine or a placebo for 6 months.

Neither researchers nor the participants knew who received the drug or the placebo that was evenly divided among the 2 groups.

At the study's start after 6 months, researchers measured blood flow to specific regions of the brain using a unique magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) technique.

Results showed that blood flow to the hippocampus- the brain's memory and learning center-increased by 20 % among the nilvadipine group compared to the placebo group.

Blood flow to other regions of the brain was unchanged in both groups.

This high BP treatment holds promise as it doesn't appear to decrease blood flow to the brain, which could cause more harm than benefit, said an associate Prof.

Even though no medical treatment is without risk, getting treatment for high BP could be important to maintain brain health in patients with Alzheimer's disease, said the Prof.

Researchers note that sample sizes were too small and follow-up time too short to reliably study the effects of this cerebral blood flow increase on structural brain measures and cognitive measures.

Study participants were screened between 2013 and 2015 as part of a larger research project comparing nilvadipine to placebo among more than 500 people with mild to moderate Alzheimer's disease.

In that larger project, effects on cerebral blood flow were not measured . Overall, no clinical benefit was noted with the use of nilvadipine.

However, a subgroup of patients with only mild symptoms of disease did show benefit, in the sense of a slower decline in memory.

Previous studies have hinted high blood pressure could reduce the risk of developing dementia.

The researchers think that beneficial effects on brain  blood flow could explain part of this effect.

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A high blood pressure drug has the potential to slow down Alzheimer's disease by improving the flow of blood to parts of the brain linked to memory, a study suggests.

Read more at: https://www.deccanherald.com/science-and-environment/bp-pill-has-potential-to-slow-down-alzheimers-study-741185.html

A high blood pressure drug has the potential to slow down Alzheimer's disease by improving the flow of blood to parts of the brain linked to memory, a study suggests.

Read more at: https://www.deccanherald.com/science-and-environment/bp-pill-has-potential-to-slow-down-alzheimers-study-741185.html

Brain-maiming protein may have spread via surgery

A dangerous protein that attacks the brain's blood vessels may have infected children via poorly sterilized surgical instruments decades before the onset of harmful bleeding, researchers reported recently.

Investigating a quartet of mysterious cases in Britain of brain lesions caused by amyloid beta deposits in young adult patients, they found that all four had undergone brain surgery as kids, suggesting a causal link.

"It is introduced into children, takes 30 years to develop, and then -- when they are in their 30s -- the blood vessels are completely loaded with amyloid beta, which destroys the vessels," a professor of Neurology and lead author of a study detailing the findings, told the media.

"This is a very well-known phenomenon in the elderly, but it is unknown in young people."

A large-scale review of medical registries -- already in the pipeline -- will be needed to confirm the deadly protein can be spread by dirty surgical instruments, he added.

Amyloid beta is one of the signature proteins of Alzheimer's, but there were no signs of the disease in the cases examined, according to the study published recently.

"We didn't find any significant amount of the pathological tau protein, which is the other hallmark protein of Alzheimer's," the lead author said.

Previous work with lab animals had shown that tiny amounts of amyloid beta can stick to steel wires and transmit the pathology into animals' brains.

In 2015, the researchers uncovered amyloid beta deposits in the brains of people who had been treated as children with growth hormones extracted from human cadavers, another indication the protein can jump from one person to another.

It has also long been known that the brain-wasting protein that causes Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, the human variant of "mad cow" sickness, can be passed on via medical procedures, or by eating infected brain matter.

Hospitals sterilize surgical equipment with high-pressure steam and chemicals that kill viruses and bacteria, but the new findings suggest these methods may not always be adequate.

'Just sterile dirt'

"What we didn't know at the time is that proteins can still be transmitted," said the researcher, who worked as a neurosurgeon for several years in the early 1990s.

He recalled one surgeon at work holding up a stainless steel instrument that had residue from a previous operation.

"'Don't worry,' the nurse in charge of sterilisation said through her mask, 'it's just sterile dirt'."

Hygiene standards are more stringent now, but the capacity of brain-attacking proteins to withstand sterilization is still unknown.

The incidence of infection during surgery with amyloid beta may be far higher than suspected, the researcher said.

But if the protein is transmitted into an adult and doesn't show up until late in life, it then becomes impossible to know whether it comes from the brain operation or the natural ageing process.

Unlike Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, which causes one death per million people each year, amyloid beta build-up is very common among the elderly, even when there are no signs of dementia.

"So that means that there might a lot more cases of contamination, but that we simply can't tell them apart," the researcher said.

Outside experts said the results were suggestive but needed to be backed up by more research.

"This study provides strong, if circumstantial, evidence for an association between neurosurgery in childhood and the development in late adult life of cerebral amyloid angiopathy (CAA)," said  a clinical psychiatrist, using the clinical name of the disease caused by the protein.

The chief scientific officer at Alzheimer's Research , made a similar assessment, adding: "Any potential link will need to be explored in much larger studies."
The researcher said he has already gotten a green light from ethics watchdogs to comb through neuropathology records.

"We plan to identify those brain biopsies of people 50 or younger who -- for any reason -- had a brain bleed caused by amyloid beta," he explained.

"Then we'll go to the clinical notes to check if they had a surgical procedure in their childhood."

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