Penn Medicine News Blog Archive: Brain and Behavior

People can have a brain full of Alzheimer's disease, but not have the dementia that typically goes along with it. By the numbers, this subset of people can have many plaques and tangles in the brain, enough to qualify them for a diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease, but in reality, they...

A diverse team of researchers from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania is in New Orleans at the American Academy of Neurology’s 64th Annual Meeting, sharing the latest data aimed at enhancing the speed of diagnosis and treatment, and ultimately helping people with neurologic conditions.

The Philadelphia Science Festival Carnival tents have all been folded and hauled away. There have already been four nights of non-stop science cafes at local watering holes. But, there are still six more days of the festival to go, and Penn Medicine faculty will be participating at events on most of those days.

Approximately 12 million Americans are seen in U.S. emergency departments each year for mental health-related symptoms. Of those patients, around 650,000 are evaluated for suicide attempts. For many of these people, it’s a frightening stop on the long and painful road of suffering that results from depression, anxiety, and substance...

In a recent Journal of Cell Biology study Erika Holzbaur, PhD, a professor of Physiology, postdoctoral researcher Sandra Maday, Ph.D., and Karen E. Wallace, all from the Perelman School of Medicine, examined autophagosomes in neurons from transgenic mice reared with florescent green biomarker. These neurons, when grown in culture, send out axon-like projections, which grew 1 mm in two days, making it easier for the team to record movies of the sacs moving along the projection. The team saw the sacs form and engulf cargo at the end of the projections farthest from the nucleus, and mature into the degradative autolysosomes as they moved toward the cell body. The autolysosomes also become increasingly acidic as they move along the axon, most likely to aid in more efficient degradation.

Sleep keeps neuroscientist Marcos Frank awake, studying the importance of slumber during early life. Building on his research showing that the brain during sleep is fundamentally different from the brain during wakefulness, Frank an associate professor of Neuroscience at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania has found that cellular changes in the sleeping brain may promote the formation of memories. In the newest study from the lab, published in the March 1 issue of Current Biology, the team found that sleep is associated with increased brain protein synthesis and transcription of messenger RNAs.

For diseases historically considered in the domain of distinct neurological sub-specialties - movement disorders, neuromuscular conditions, and dementia - the steady increase in our understanding of their overlapping causes and symptoms, as well as their co-existence in the same individual, has led to a shift in how care is delivered. Physicians, nurse practitioners, therapists, and other care-team members are cross-training and collaborating more than ever.

With this year’s Super Bowl setting a record for being the most-viewed show in U.S. television history, concussions – more technically, mild traumatic brain injury (TBI) – have probably been on many a mind this week. TBI has long been a leading cause of death and disability, with over 1.7 million cases in the US alone each year.

Research from the Department of Psychiatry could have ended up as four or five different interesting papers with moderate impact in the field. Instead, we were able to tell a complete story by linking potential genetic risk factors of schizophrenia to a functional disruption in how the brain responds to sound. We then linked those processes together by identifying reduced activity in special nerve cells that are designed to make other cells in the brain work together at a very fast pace.

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) provides exquisite structural detail of the brain, for example, to detect tumors or relative size of regions. However, current MRI methods are not capable of imaging the distribution of neurotransmitters – the brain’s chemical messengers -- across the whole brain. A new Nature Medicine paper out this week from Perelman School of Medicine researchers led by Ravinder Reddy, PhD, professor of Radiology, describes a first-of-its-kind MRI technique (GluCEST) to measure glutamate concentration and local changes across the whole brain. The technique is based on chemical exchange effects of protons in water.