Neuroscienze in pillole :)

...tutte le ultime ricerche "in pillole"! :approved: ...quelle che sono interessanti da conoscere ma non tanto da discuterne in un thread apposito... per mantenerci comunque sempre aggiornati! :)

Come per la biblioteca, potete segnalare voi stessi qualche ricerca interessante e noi mod ci occuperemo di inserirne un brevissimo sunto in questo primo post, con il link al post della segnalazione! :approved: Le ricerche saranno inserite in ordine decrescente, quindi la più recente sarà sempre al primo posto e quindi di più rapida visibilità! :approved:

considerando che la maggior parte delle ricerche sono in inglese, credo che le possiamo segnalare senza tradurle (anche perchè richiederebbe troppo tempo...) :approved: se qualcuno ha problemi può sempre chiedere una mano! :)
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11 novembre MIT Researcher Presents New View Of How The Cortex Forms
How does the cortex, the brain's executive in charge of high-level thinking and planning, go from a uniform blob of brain matter to well-defined areas with specific sensing, cognition and movement tasks?
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11 novembre Heredity May Be The Reason Some People Feel Lonely
Heredity helps determine why some adults are persistently lonely, research co-authored by psychologists at the University of Chicago shows. Working with colleagues in The Netherlands, the scholars found about 50 percent of identical twins and 25 percent of fraternal twins shared similar characteristics of loneliness. Research on twins is a powerful method to study the impact of heredity because twins raised together share many of the same environmental influences as well as similar genes.
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10 novembre Meditation Can Increase the Brain's Grey Matter
Meditation has been linked to structural changes in areas of the brain that are important for sensory, cognitive and emotional processing, according to research published in the November issue of NeuroReport (http://www.neuroreport.com/).
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7 novembre Un gene associato alla dislessia
Le mutazioni di DCDC2 sarebbero ereditarie
Alcuni ricercatori della Scuola di Medicina dell'Università di Yale hanno identificato un gene sul cromosoma umano 6, chiamato DCDC2, che sarebbe associato alla dislessia.
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Meditation Can Increase the Brain's Grey Matter
Contributed by Carla Sharetto| 10 November, 2005 19:43 GMT

Researchers observed an association between the regular practice of meditation and increased thickness in a subset of cortical regions related to sensory, auditory, visual and internal perception. Meditation has been linked to structural changes in areas of the brain that are important for sensory, cognitive and emotional processing, according to research published in the November issue of NeuroReport.
Meditation already is known to alter resting brain patterns, which suggests long-lasting brain changes. The new study by researchers from Yale, Harvard, Massachusetts General Hospital and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology shows the practice also is associated with increased cortical thickness.

'You Don't Have to Be a Monk'

The study, led by Sara Lazar, assistant in psychology at Massachusetts General Hospital, involved 20 individuals who had extensive training in Buddhist Insight meditation.

Despite the small number of participants, the results are significant, maintains Jeremy Gray, assistant professor of psychology at Yale and co-author of the study.

"What is most fascinating to me is the suggestion that meditation practice can change anyone's grey matter," Gray says. "The study participants were people with jobs and families. They just meditated on average 40 minutes each day. You don't have to be a monk."

May Slow Age-Related Thinning

Through magnetic resonance imaging, the researchers observed an association between the regular practice of meditation and increased thickness in a subset of cortical regions related to sensory, auditory, visual and internal perception -- such as heart rate or breathing.

Regular meditation practice also may slow age-related thinning of the frontal cortex, they found.

"Most of the regions identified in this study were found in the right hemisphere," note the researchers. "The right hemisphere is essential for sustaining attention, which is a central practice of Insight meditation."

Other forms of yoga and meditation likely have a similar impact on cortical structure, they believe, although each tradition would be expected to have a slightly different pattern of cortical thickening based on the specific mental exercises involved.


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Source: University of Chicago

Date: 2005-11-11

Heredity May Be The Reason Some People Feel Lonely

Heredity helps determine why some adults are persistently lonely, research co-authored by psychologists at the University of Chicago shows.

Working with colleagues in The Netherlands, the scholars found about 50 percent of identical twins and 25 percent of fraternal twins shared similar characteristics of loneliness. Research on twins is a powerful method to study the impact of heredity because twins raised together share many of the same environmental influences as well as similar genes, thus making it easier to determine the role of genetics in development.

"An interesting implication of this research is that feelings of loneliness may reflect an innate emotional response to stimulus conditions over which an individual may have little or no control," the research team writes in the article, "Genetic and Environmental Contributors to Loneliness in Adults: The Netherlands Twin Register Study" published in the current issue of the journal Behavior Genetics. Psychologists had previously thought loneliness was primarily caused by shyness, poor social skills, or inability to form strong attachments with other people.

Scholars are becoming increasingly interested in the role loneliness plays in health. Other work by John Cacioppo, the Tiffany & Margaret Blake Distinguished Service Professor in Psychology at the University of Chicago and a member of the research team, shows that loneliness is a risk factor for heart disease. Loneliness is also at the base of a number of emotional conditions, such as self-esteem, mood, anxiety, anger and sociability.

A caring environment can help lonely people overcome their feelings, but the research also shows that in some cases, the impact of heredity is stronger, said Cacioppo, who was joined in the study by Louise Hawkley, a Senior Research Scientist in Psychology at the University.

The lead author of the article was Dorret Boomsma, a Professor of Biolgoical Psychology at the Free University in Amsterdam. Boomsma is one of the world's most prominent researchers on twins and heredity. Other researchers with the project are Gonneke Willemsen of the Free University and Conor Dolan of the University of Amsterdam.

The study was based on data from 8,387 twins in The Netherlands, who have been surveyed regularly since 1991. Smaller, earlier studies done with children suggested that the tendency toward loneliness could be inherited. The Dutch-U.S. study is the first to be done on adults and shows that heredity persists in playing a role in loneliness as people age.

As part of the study, the twins were asked to rate to what extent certain descriptions applied to them, such as "Others don't like me," "I lose friends very quickly," "I feel lonely," and "Nobody loves me."

People noted a wide variety of responses to the descriptions, with 35 percent of the men and 50 percent of the women reporting moderate to extreme feelings of loneliness.

The researchers write that loneliness may have developed early in human evolution as a response by hunter-gathers facing conditions of undernourishment who may have decided not to share their food with their families. By surviving a famine, those early ancestors would be able to propagate during periods of plenty, the researchers theorized. In developing loneliness as an adaptation to survival, these early humans also developed dispositions toward anxiety, hostility, negativity and social avoidance, they said.

The research was funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research and the U.S. National Institute of Aging.

"The genetics of social behavior is an intriguing and expanding area of research," says Jeffrey W. Elias, cognitive aging specialist at the National Institute on Aging (NIA). "This study suggests there may be a genetic component to loneliness, such that people with a predisposition to loneliness may process social interaction and information differently. This is important to know as we investigate the effects of behavior and emotion on health and longevity."



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07.11.2005
Un gene associato alla dislessia
Le mutazioni di DCDC2 sarebbero ereditarie


Alcuni ricercatori della Scuola di Medicina dell'Università di Yale hanno identificato un gene sul cromosoma umano 6, chiamato DCDC2, che sarebbe associato alla dislessia, un disturbo della lettura che colpisce milioni di bambini e di adulti. Gli scienziati hanno scoperto che una mutazione genetica di DCDC2 conduce a un difetto nella formazione dei circuiti cerebrali che rendono possibile la lettura. L'alterazione genetica sarebbe ereditaria.
"Questi promettenti risultati - commenta Jeffrey R. Gruen, principale autore della ricerca - potrebbero condurci verso metodi diagnostici migliori per identificare la dislessia e comprendere più a fondo come funziona il processo della lettura a livello molecolare". Lo studio è stato pubblicato su un numero speciale della rivista "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences". Gruen e il primo autore, Haiying Mend, hanno presentato i risultati il 28 ottobre al convegno dell'American Society of Human Genetics (ASHG) a Salt Lake City, negli Stati Uniti.
I ricercatori hanno usato un approccio statistico per studiare e confrontare marcatori specifici del DNA in 153 famiglie dislessiche. "Ora - spiega Gruen - abbiano forti prove statistiche del fatto che un gran numero di casi di dislessia, forse il 20 per cento, è dovuto al gene DCDC2. L'alterazione genetica su questo cromosoma corrisponde alla cancellazione di una regione regolatrice. Lo stesso gene è espresso nei centri della lettura del cervello, dove modula la migrazione di neuroni. Questa architettura cerebrale è necessaria per leggere normalmente".


© 1999 - 2005 Le Scienze S.p.A.

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Source: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Date: 2005-11-11

MIT Researcher Presents New View Of How The Cortex Forms
A leading neuroscientist at MIT and one from the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF) report in the Nov. 4 special issue of Science dedicated to the brain that the controversy is over: The "protomap" and "protocortex" theories of brain development are dead.

The cerebral cortex is a sheet of around 10 billion neurons divided into distinctly separate areas that process particular aspects of sensation, movement and cognition. To what extent are these areas predetermined by genes or shaped by the environment? The protomap and protocortex theories developed before 1990 claimed, respectively, that the task-specific regions of the cortex are spawned by a zone of "originator" cells; or that long nerve fibers from the thalamus, a large ovoid mass that relays information to the cortex from other brain regions, are activated by external stimuli to impose identity on the homogeneous blob.

New evidence indicates that the development of cortical areas involves "a rich array of signals," an interwoven cascade of developmental events, some internal and some external, according to co-authors Mriganka Sur, Sherman Fairchild Professor of Neuroscience at the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory and the MIT Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, and John L. R. Rubenstein of UCSF.

"Recent evidence has altered researchers' understanding of how cortical areas form, connect with other brain regions, develop unique processing networks and adapt to changes in inputs," Sur said. "Understanding basic mechanisms of cortical development is central to understanding disorders of development."

Sur, chair of the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, is leading an ambitious, multifaceted approach to understanding the genetic, molecular and behavioral aspects of autism.

In the Science review article, "Patterning and Plasticity of the Cerebral Cortex," Sur and Rubenstein point out that transcription factors are key. A transcription factor is a protein that binds DNA at a specific site where it regulates transcription, or the process of copying genetic material.

In the brain's early prenatal development, transcription factors control the birth and growth of new neurons, neurons' movement and connectivity within the brain, and which ones live and which are killed off.

Later, at a critical point in development, activity in the form of outside stimulation refines the brain's topography and networks to create the specific functions and areas of the postnatal mammalian brain.

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This work is supported by the National Institutes of Health, the Marcus Fund and the Simons Foundation.

L'articolo lo trovate qui.


Questo infine è l'abrstract dell'articolo apparso sul numero del 4 novembre di Science:

Patterning and Plasticity of the Cerebral Cortex
Mriganka Sur1* and John L. R. Rubenstein2*

The cerebral cortex of the human brain is a sheet of about 10 billion neurons divided into discrete subdivisions or areas that process particular aspects of sensation, movement, and cognition. Recent evidence has begun to transform our understanding of how cortical areas form, make specific connections with other brain regions, develop unique processing networks, and adapt to changes in inputs.

1 Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 77 Massachusetts Ave., 46-6237, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.
2 Nina Ireland Laboratory of Developmental Neurobiology, 1550 4th Street, 2nd Floor South, Room GD 284C, University of California at San Francisco, San Francisco, CA 94143–2611, USA.

da Molecular.Lab
un sito molto bello e utile
L'Alzheimer può essere diagnosticato 4 anni prima della comparsa dei primi sintomi
I nuovi strumenti diagnostici permetteranno di attuare terapie per rallentarne il decorso
http://www.molecularlab.it/public/ne...cefalo_tac.jpg
Secondo uno studio condotto da un team di neurologi, coordinata dallo scienziato francese Bruno Dubois dell'ospedale Pitié-Salpêtrière di Parigi, sostiene che è possibile diagnosticare il morbo di Alzheimer tre o quattro anni prima della comparsa dei primi sintomi ed è possibile anche rallentarne lo sviluppo.
Alcuni sintomi della malattia sono la perdita di memoria e lo smarrimento che diventano via via più frequenti nel corso dell'avanzamento della patologia. Questi sintomi erano, fino ad oggi, il punto di partenza per la diagnosi di Alzheimer.
Bruno Dubois ha spiegato: “I nuovi criteri proposti per la diagnosi permetteranno di riconoscere la malattia 3 o 4 anni prima”. Questo sarà possibile grazie agli strumenti che sono a disposizione dei medici: diagnostica per immagini (ad esempio la risonanza magnetica), test per la memoria, marcatori biologici presenti nel liquido cerebrospinale. Lo scienziato francese ha anche aggiunto: “Nei prossimi anni ci saranno sicuramente a disposizione dei farmaci in grado di rallentare il processo neurodegenerativo della malattia. Per questo è fondamentale diagnosticarla il prima possibile.”
I nuovi criteri diagnostici proposti sono stati pubblicati in un articolo su The Lancet Neurology.
Redazione MolecularLab.it (12/07/2007)

vi passo questo link:http://http://lescienze.espresso.rep...ticolo/1341486

UNO STUDIO SU Nature e scientific, da faubert università di Montreal sulle capacità degli atleti sportivi.
Dimostrerebbe, le peculiari competenze cognitivo-percettive, che consente loro di elaborare scene molto complesse, di recente era stato scoperto che la corteccia cerebrale degli atleti è più spessa nel solco temporale superiore.(area coinvolta, nell'elaborazione degli stimoli socialmente rilevanti, e nella percezione del movimento).Nello studio Faubert ha usato la tecnica 3D-MOT, che consente di testare la capacità dell'individuo di percepire un numero rilevante di oggetti in movimento, con una soglia di velocità, in uno spazio tridimensionale. Su 308 atleti professionisti div ari sport, hanno mostrato prestazioni nettamente superiori, rispetto dilettanti di alto livello,che a loro volta erano superiori come prestazioni ai non atleti.. Quindi la peculiarità degli atleti, è quella di elaborare le informazioni visivo e dinamiche molto complesse.