My Medical Reviews

Since the mid 1990s researchers have been trying to understand the impact of a chemical called DOPAL (short for endogenous metabolite 3,4-dihydroxyphenylacetaldehyde) on people with Parkinson's disease. This is the culmination of many years of research on the subject.

"The findings provide a target for Pharmaceutical companies and other researchers to block DOPAL formation and its toxic effects," wrote lead researcher William J. Burke MD, PhD, in an email to My Parkinson's info.

Scientists have long known that a key protein called alpha-synuclein plays a role in the development of Parkinson's disease.

Alpha-synuclein is found throughout the brain—but in some people, the protein clumps together. This causes the death of the dopamine-producing cells, which in turn causes Parkinson's to develop.

New UC Irvine research is among the first to demonstrate that neural stem cells may help to restore memory after brain damage.

In the study, mice with brain injuries experienced enhanced memory -- similar to the level found in healthy mice -- up to three months after receiving a stem cell treatment. Scientists believe the stem cells secreted proteins called neurotrophins that protected vulnerable cells from death and rescued memory. This creates hope that a drug to boost production of these proteins could be developed to restore the ability to remember in patients with neuronal loss.

"Our research provides clear evidence that stem cells can reverse memory loss," said Frank LaFerla, professor of neurobiology and behavior at UCI. "This gives us hope that stem cells someday could help restore brain function in humans suffering from a wide range of diseases and injuries that impair memory formation."

The results of the study appear Oct. 31 in the Journal of Neuroscience.

LaFerla, Mathew Blurton-Jones and Tritia Yamasaki performed their experiments using a new type of genetically engineered mouse that develops brain lesions in areas designated by the scientists. For this study, they destroyed cells in the hippocampus, an area of the brain vital to memory formation and where neurons often die.

To test memory, the researchers gave place and object recognition tests to healthy mice and mice with brain injuries. Memories of place depend upon the hippocampus, and memories of objects depend more upon the cortex. In the place test, healthy mice remembered their surroundings about 70 percent of the time, but mice with brain injuries remembered it just 40 percent of the time. In the object test, healthy mice remembered objects about 80 percent of the time, while injured mice remembered as poorly as about 65 percent of the time.

The scientists then set out to learn whether neural stem cells from a mouse could improve memory in mice with brain injuries. To test this, they injected each mouse with about 200,000 neural stem cells that were engineered to appear green under ultraviolet light. The color allows the scientists to track the stem cells inside the mouse brain after transplantation.

Three months after implanting the stem cells, the mice were tested on place recognition. The researchers found that mice with brain injuries that also received stem cells remembered their surroundings about 70 percent of the time -- the same level as healthy mice. In contrast, control mice that didn't receive stem cells still had memory impairments.

Next, the scientists took a closer look at how the green-colored stem cells behaved in the mouse brain. They found that only about 4 percent of them turned into neurons, indicating the stem cells were not improving memory simply by replacing the dead brain cells. In the healthy mice, the stem cells migrated throughout the brain, but in the mice with neuronal loss, the cells congregated in the hippocampus, the area of the injury. Interestingly, mice that had been treated with stem cells had more neurons four months after the transplantation than mice that had not been treated.

"We know that very few of the cells are becoming neurons, so we think that the stem cells are instead enhancing the local brain microenvironment," Blurton-Jones said. "We have evidence suggesting that the stem cells provide support to vulnerable and injured neurons, keeping them alive and functional by making beneficial proteins called neurotrophins."

If supplemental neurotrophins are in fact at the root of memory enhancement, scientists could try to create a drug that enhances the release or production of these proteins. Scientists then could spend less time coaxing stem cells to turn into other types of cells, at least as it relates to memory research.

"Much of the focus in stem cell research has been how to turn them into different types of cells such as neurons, but maybe that is not always necessary," Yamasaki said. "In this case, we did not have to make neurons to improve memory."

With nearly 30 percent of Indians suffering from obesity, people may be blaming their food habits.
But doctors in the capital Thursday said the real cause of this ailment lies in the brain. We are not giving a clean chit to food and lifestyle habits for this disease but metabolic activities in the brain is a major cause of this ailment.

Certain activities in the brain affect our genes and food intake. Due to this development, over 70 percent of intake calories get deposited in our body leading to problems like obesity and diabetes.
When a person becomes obese, it continues for at least the three next generations.If a person acquires obesity by himself without any contribution from his forefathers, then his next three generations will suffer from the ailment.

New medical procedures like surgery, stem cell therapy, gene therapy, insulin inhaler and other upcoming cheap but efficient drugs to tackle obesity and diabetes problems will be discussed at the conference. Health experts said currently nearly 30 percent of Indians are overweight and at least 50 percent of the country's population will suffer from this problem in next one decade.
Obesity is no more a disease of the adult and male population. Females and minors are getting affected by it too. While 57 percent of obese people suffer from Type-2 diabetes, 30 percent face gallbladder diseases, 14 percent osteoarthritis, 17 percent face hypertension and cardiovascular diseases. Some also face problems like uterine and breast cancer.

The problem is obesity leads to many health hazards and at one time a single individual may face a number of ailments. For every one diabetes case diagnosed in our country, two cases go undiagnosed and four cases have intolerable glucose level, which means they are on the verge of getting diabetic.