GABA tagged posts

New therapeutic molecules developed at Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) show promise in reversing the memory loss linked to depression and aging.
These molecules not only rapidly improve symptoms, but remarkably, also appear to renew the underlying brain impairments causing memory loss in preclinical models.

“Currently there are no medications to treat cognitive symptoms such as memory loss that occur in depression, other mental illnesses and aging,” says Dr. Etienne Sibille, Deputy Director of the Campbell Family Mental Health Research Institute at CAMH and lead scientist on the study.

What’s unique and p...

neurotransmission

The bioelectronic neural pixel: Chemical stimulation and electrical sensing at the same site. A small device both detects the initial signal of an epileptic attack and doses a substance that effectively stops it. All this takes place where the signal arises – in an area of size 20×20 μm known as a “neural pixel.” According to a recently produced estimate, no less than 6% of the Earth’s population suffers from some type of neurological illness such as epilepsy or Parkinson’s. Some medicines are available, but when these are taken orally or injected into the bloodstream, they also end up where they aren’t needed and may cause serious problems. All medicines have more or less severe side effects.

The small 20×20 μm device developed by the scientists can both capture signal...

Richard Maddock and his team conducted MRI exams of people before and after vigorous exercise to determine the effect of exercise on neurotransmitters. Credit: Image courtesy of University of California – Davis Health System

Intense exercise increases levels of 2 common neurotransmitters – glutamate and GABA The finding offers new insights into brain metabolism and why exercise could become an important part of treating depression and other neuropsychiatric disorders linked with deficiencies in neurotransmitters, which drive communications between the brain cells that regulate physical and emotional health.

“Major depressive disorder is often characterized by depleted glutamate and GABA, which return to normal when mental health is restored,” said Prof. Richard Maddock...

In this composite image, a human nerve cell derived from a patient with Rett syndrome shows significantly decreased levels of KCC2 compared to a control cell.
Image: Gong Chen lab, Penn State University

“The most exciting part of this research is that it directly uses human neurons that originated from Rett Syndrome patients as a clinically-relevant disease model to investigate the underlying mechanism,” said Dr. Chen...