Category Health/Medical

Electronic glasses have been proven as effective as eye patches for lazy eye in children. Credit: American Academy of Ophthalmology

Programmable digital glasses for lazy eye work as well as eye patching, study shows, improving vision by about 2 lines on the reading chart after 3 months. First new effective lazy eye treatment in 50 years. Amblyopia remains the most common cause of visual impairment in children.The child needs to receive treatment by the age of 8 or so while their eyes and brain are still developing, or he or she could become blind in the weaker eye.

Unfortunately, its hard getting kids to comply with lazy eye treatments like eye patches or medicated drops.Nearly 15% refuse to take eye drops at all. Both drops and eye patches work based on the occlusion method...

The Salk team expanded upon their previous development of a drug candidate J147, which takes a different tack by targeting Alzheimer’s major risk factor—old age. In the new work, the team showed that the drug candidate worked well in a mouse model of aging not typically used in Alzheimer’s research. When these mice were treated with J147, they had better memory and cognition, healthier blood vessels in the brain and other improved physiological features.

“Initially, the impetus was to test this drug in a novel animal model that was more similar to 99% of Alzheimer’s cases,” says Prof Antonio Currais. “We did not predict we’d see this sort of anti-aging effect, but J147 made old mice look like they were young, based upon a number of physiological parameters.”

Alzheimer’s is the 3rd ...

Orosensory stimulation produced by consuming a sweetened solution and possibly the hedonic value of that sweet stimulation induces synaptic plasticity in dHC CA1 neurons in an experience-dependent manner. Collectively, these findings are consistent with our hypothesis that dHC neurons form a memory of a meal.

Neurons in the dorsal hippocampus, the part of the brain that is critical for episodic memory, are activated by consuming sweets. Episodic memory is the memory of autobiographical events experienced at a particular time and place.

In the study, a meal consisting of a sweetened solution, either sucrose or saccharin, significantly increased the expression of the synaptic plasticity marker called activity-regulated cytoskeleton-associated protein (Arc) in dorsal hippocampal neurons in ra...

PFF limits spread of glioblastoma multiforme, or GBM – the most common primary tumor of the brain and CNS by targeting protein TROY. In addition, TGen lab research also found PPF increases effectiveness of a standard-of-care chemotherapy drug called temozolomide (TMZ), and radiation, to treat glioblastoma. “We showed that PPF decreased glioblastoma cell expression of TROY, inhibited glioma cell invasion, and made brain cancer cells more vulnerable to TMZ and radiation,” said Dr. Nhan Tran, Ass Prof and head of TGen’s Central Nervous System Tumor Research Lab.

An advantage of small-molecule PPF – previously used in clinical trials in an attempt to treat Alzheimer’s disease and dementia – is that it can penetrate the blood-brain barrier and reach the tumor...