Category: News

UCalgary researchers discover stress isn’t just contagious; it alters the brain on a cellular level

In a new study in Nature Neuroscience, Jaideep Bains, PhD, and his team at the Cumming School of Medicine’s Hotchkiss Brain Institute (HBI), at the University of Calgary have discovered that stress transmitted from others can change the brain in the same way as a real stress does. The study, in mice, also shows that the effects of stress on the brain are reversed in female mice following a social interaction. This was not true for male mice.
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Treating people affected by Parkinson’s disease by grafting healthy neurons is an attractive idea which has not yet given the anticipated results up until now.  Even if grafted neurons survive, they are not able to recreate the dopaminergic neuron circuits that are essential for normal brain function.  An international team led by Martin Lévesque, professor at Université Laval and researcher at the CERVO Brain Research Centre, might have figured out why.  In a recent edition of Nature Communications, the researchers propose a “recipe” to produce neurons that could reconstitute the neuron circuits that are destroyed by Parkinson’s disease. Continue reading →

A study by a group of researchers led by Alain Dagher from The Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital of McGill University has tested the theory that brain degeneration in Parkinson’s disease (PD) originates in subcortical regions and spreads along neural networks to the cerebral cortex. By analyzing data on PD patients and healthy controls collected over one year, the researchers found that brain regions closely connected to subcortical regions showed the most degeneration over the one-year period in PD patients, and that this happens earlier than previously thought. Continue reading →

A discovery by Hideto Takahashi and his team paves the way for a better understanding of the mechanisms of neuropsychiatric disorders.

Did you know? Your body is made up of a hundred billion nerve cells that, like small computers, receive, process and deliver crucial information to your body. These machines are your neurons. They form the very foundation of your nervous system. It is through them that your brain converts the data transmitted by your retina into images and that your mood adapts to the situations you are living. Continue reading →

Volume in brain region linked to physiological changes characteristic of AD

New research has drawn a link between changes in the brain’s anatomy and biomarkers that are known to appear at the earliest stages of Alzheimer’s disease (AD), findings that could one day provide a sensitive but non-invasive test for AD before cognitive symptoms appear. Continue reading →

A recent publication by Caroline Ménard shows that chronic stress, as occurs in cases of bullying, can make the blood-brain barrier more permeable to contaminants and microbes that may be in the blood.  As the brains of depressed individuals show signs of inflammation, Caroline Ménard and her colleagues had hypothesized that leakiness of the blood brain barrier could allow molecules and microbes to reach the brain, causing inflammation. Continue reading →

Learning and memory are crucial parts of human cognition, yet the biological processes that govern how we learn and store different types of memories are poorly understood. Although a cellular process called synaptic plasticity has long been thought to contribute to learning and memory, many of the neural mechanisms behind synaptic plasticity have remained unclear.

In a recently published study entitled The C-terminal tails of endogenous GluA1 and GluA2 differentially contribute to hippocampal synaptic plasticity and learning, researchers from The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) have discovered the precise neuronal mechanisms that can regulate synaptic plasticity to influence distinct forms of memory. We sat down with Dr. Zhengping Jia, a Senior Scientist in the Neurosciences & Mental Health Program at SickKids who led the study, published online in Nature Neuroscience. Continue reading →

Dr. David Park has spent countless hours exploring how deactivating a gene impacts the way a cell handles the very nutrients it needs for its own survival and proper function. To Park and his research team, it’s an essential piece of the puzzle that is Parkinson’s disease.

Parkinson’s affects 10 million people worldwide, causing a degeneration of the body’s nerve cells and a progressive loss of motor control. Continue reading →

Deteriorating memory function is a scary, life changing symptom associated with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) – a neurodegenerative disease exhibited by cognitive declines such as speech, behaviour and thinking processes. Even though it is the most common form of dementia and the prevalence is continuously rising, there is no cure. While there are medications to help with symptoms, the disease ultimately results in mortality. Continue reading →