Patient strums guitar during procedure.

Brain patient strums guitar.

A team of UCLA Health System brain specialists implanted a brain pacemaker in a 39-year-old man today (May 23). It was the 500th such procedure the team had completed, but the first time the group had invited followers to observe the procedure on Twitter. Updates with Instagram photos and short video clips were posted using the hashtag #UCLAORLive.

The procedure stimulates an area of the brain and implants a brain pacemaker to treat Parkinson’s disease and essential tremors. During today’s operation, which was overseen by Dr. Nader Pouratian, the patient was awakened and asked to play a guitar to assist the team in placing electrodes into position. Pouratian is director of the UCLA Functional and Movement Disorder Program.

Brad Carter, the patient, is a Los Angeles-based actor, musician and stand-up comedian who developed hand tremors in 2006. He had lost the ability to perform, but after the brain stimulation portion of the surgery, his detxerity on the guitar was much improved. Carter gave his authorization for the surgery to be shared via Twitter and the social media outlet’s Vine video application.

UCLA live-tweeted the surgery with the hope that it would help alleviate future patients’ fear of the procedure. About 10 million Americans live with essential tremors and more than 1 million suffer from Parkinson’s disease. Many UCLA patients have found deep brain stimulation beneficial in stopping the tremors and helpful in enabling them to lead normal lives.

Before the procedure began, the patient explained what notes he would be playing on the guitar.

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UC Davis study is first to track development of fragile X-associated tremor/ataxia syndrome.

Susan Rivera, UC Davis

Researchers at the UC Davis MIND Institute and the UC Davis Center for Mind and Brain have received a five-year, $3 million grant from the National Institute of Mental Health to conduct the first long-range study of the mental and psychological decline that accompanies the age-related neurological disorder fragile X-associated tremor/ataxia syndrome, or FXTAS.

FXTAS first was identified in 2001 by UC Davis MIND Institute professors Paul and Randi Hagerman. It was discovered after Randi Hagerman, a developmental and behavioral pediatrician, noticed the symptoms in older male family members of the children she treated with fragile X syndrome, the most common genetic cause of intellectual disability and the leading single-gene cause of autism.

FXTAS is a late-onset neurodegenerative disorder. It affects carriers of a small mutation — also called a premutation — of the fragile X mental retardation 1 (FMR1) gene. Characteristics of FXTAS include debilitating balance problems, tremor, memory loss and dementia. It occurs more frequently in male than in female premutation carriers. Prior to its discovery, FXTAS was often misdiagnosed as other neurodegenerative disorders, such as Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s diseases. The scientists said they hope to learn how to better diagnose and treat the condition.

For the first time, researchers will study the progression of the disorder in adult male carriers of the FMR1 premutation between the ages of 40 and 69, comparing them to men of the same age without the mutation. It is not known why, how, or when some individuals become affected with the disorder and others do not, said Susan Rivera, a professor of psychology affiliated with the MIND Institute and the UC Davis Center for Mind and Brain. Rivera is co-principal investigator for the study and will lead the research with David Hessl, co-principal investigator and associate clinical professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences.

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Low-cost, at-home treatment involves sensory exercises with common household items.

Michael Leon, UC Irvine

Children with autism showed significant improvement after six months of simple sensory exercises at home using everyday items such as scents, spoons and sponges, according to UC Irvine neurobiologists.

They found that a treatment known as environmental enrichment led to notable gains in male subjects between the ages of 3 and 12. Results appear online in Behavioral Neuroscience.

Study co-authors Cynthia Woo and Michael Leon randomly assigned 28 boys to one of two groups, balanced for age and autism severity. For half a year, all subjects participated in standard autism therapies, but those in one group also had daily sensory enrichment exercises.

Parents of these children were given a kit containing household products to increase environmental stimulation, including essential-oil fragrances such as apple, lavender, lemon and vanilla. The boys smelled four of these scents a day and listened to classical music each evening.

In addition, the parents conducted twice-daily sessions of four to seven exercises with their children involving different combinations of sensory stimuli – touch, temperature, sight and movement among them. Each session took 15 to 30 minutes to complete.

After six months of therapy, 42 percent of the children in the enrichment group showed significant improvement in behaviors commonly affected by autism – such as relating to people, having typical emotional responses and listening – compared with 7 percent in the standard-care group.

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App developed by the UCSF School of Medicine in partnership with Bandwdth.

UC San Francisco has launched a new app for the Apple iPad that presents a novel approach to learning the neurological physical exam, a challenging series of assessments aimed at diagnosing neurological disorders in patients.

The app, called UCSF NeuroExam Tutor, helps medical students, residents and physicians overcome “neurophobia,” the feeling many people get when given the seemingly impossible task to learn and master the comprehensive version that has been traditionally taught.

“At UCSF, we are committed to using technology to enhance our students’ ability to learn,” said Catherine Lucey, M.D., vice dean of education at the UCSF School of Medicine. “This app represents a wonderful collaboration between app developers, clinicians and educators, and will help our students master a traditionally difficult set of skills.”

The UCSF NeuroExam Tutor was developed by the UCSF School of Medicine under the leadership of Vanja Douglas, M.D., assistant professor of neurology and Susannah Cornes, M.D., assistant professor and director of the Epilepsy Resident Rotation. It was designed in partnership with Bandwdth, a global educational development company. Fourth-year medical student Dylan Alegria helped spearhead the project as part of his medical education technology fellowship. In recent years, UCSF has invested heavily in the development of a variety of information technology and management resources to give health care providers, educators, scientists and students the tools to succeed in the rapidly evolving digital age.

“It has been a wonderful opportunity for me to help drive this project,” said Alegria. “Having students at the table, alongside clinical experts, designers and programers, helped create an innovative tool that suits the needs of both educators and learners.”

Available in the iTunes Store, the app costs $19.99 and covers seven areas: coordination and gait, cranial nerves, mental status, motor control, reflexes, and sensation. As learners move through the app, they have access to more than 60 high-quality videos, 50 different physical exam maneuvers, flashcards, and advice from master clinicians at UCSF.

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Center brings together many disciplines to respond to President Obama’s “grand challenge.”

(From left) Nick Spitzer, Ralph Greenspan and Terry Sejnowski.

Responding to President Barack Obama’s “grand challenge” to chart the function of the human brain in unprecedented detail, UC San Diego has established the Center for Brain Activity Mapping (CBAM). The new center, under the aegis of the interdisciplinary Kavli Institute for Brain and Mind at UC San Diego, will tackle the technological and biological challenge of developing a new generation of tools to enable recording of neuronal activity throughout the brain. It will also conduct brain-mapping experiments and analyze the collected data.

Ralph Greenspan – one of the original architects of a visionary proposal that eventually led to the national BRAIN Initiative launched by President Obama in April – has been named CBAM’s founding director.

UC San Diego Chancellor Pradeep K. Khosla, who attended Obama’s unveiling of the BRAIN Initiative, said: “I am pleased to announce the launch of the Center for Brain Activity Mapping. This new center will require the type of in-depth and impactful research that we are so good at producing at UC San Diego. We have strengths here on our campus and the Torrey Pines Mesa, both in breadth of talent and in the scientific openness to collaborate across disciplines, that few others can offer the project.”

Greenspan, who also serves as associate director of the Kavli Institute for Brain and Mind at UC San Diego, said CBAM will focus on developing new technologies necessary for global brain-mapping at the resolution level of single cells and the timescale of a millisecond, participate in brain mapping experiments, and develop the necessary support mechanisms for handling and analyzing the enormous datasets that such efforts will produce.

Brain-mapping discoveries made by CBAM may shed light on such brain disorders as autism, traumatic brain injury and Alzheimer’s – and could potentially point the way to new treatments, Greenspan said. The technologies developed and advances in understanding brain networks will also likely have industrial applications outside of medicine, he said.

The new center will bring together researchers from neuroscience (including cognitive science, psychology, neurology and psychiatry), engineering, nanoscience, radiology, chemistry, physics, computer science and mathematics.

“An essential component of the center will be its close relationships with other San Diego research institutions and with industrial partners in the region’s high-tech and biotech clusters,” said Nick Spitzer, distinguished professor of neurobiology and director of the Kavli Institute for Brain and Mind at UC San Diego.

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UC researchers part of Obama initiative to map the brain

Researchers pinpoint brain regions involved in creating those alternate pathways.

Michael Fanselow, UCLA

When the brain’s primary “learning center” is damaged, complex new neural circuits arise to compensate for the lost function, say life scientists from UCLA and Australia who have pinpointed the regions of the brain involved in creating those alternate pathways — often far from the damaged site.

The research, conducted by UCLA’s Michael Fanselow and Moriel Zelikowsky in collaboration with Bryce Vissel, a group leader of the neuroscience research program at Sydney’s Garvan Institute of Medical Research, appears this week in the early online edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The researchers found that parts of the prefrontal cortex take over when the hippocampus, the brain’s key center of learning and memory formation, is disabled. Their breakthrough discovery, the first demonstration of such neural-circuit plasticity, could potentially help scientists develop new treatments for Alzheimer’s disease, stroke and other conditions involving damage to the brain.

For the study, Fanselow and Zelikowsky conducted laboratory experiments with rats showing that the rodents were able to learn new tasks even after damage to the hippocampus. While the rats needed more training than they would have normally, they nonetheless learned from their experiences — a surprising finding.

“I expect that the brain probably has to be trained through experience,” said Fanselow, a professor of psychology and member of the UCLA Brain Research Institute, who was the study’s senior author. “In this case, we gave animals a problem to solve.”

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Device could become cost-effective diagnostic tool in areas where access to care is limited.

Technology developed at UC Berkeley harnesses wireless signals for instant brain diagnostics.

New technology developed at the University of California, Berkeley, is using wireless signals to provide real-time, non-invasive diagnoses of brain swelling or bleeding.

The device analyzes data from low energy electromagnetic waves that are similar to those used to transmit radio and mobile signals. The technology, described in the May 14 issue of the journal PLOS ONE, could potentially become a cost-effective tool for medical diagnostics and to triage injuries in areas where access to medical care, especially medical imaging, is limited.

The researchers tested a prototype in a small-scale pilot study of healthy adults and brain trauma patients admitted to a military hospital for the Mexican Army. The results from the healthy participants were clearly distinguishable from the patients with brain damage, and data for bleeding was distinct from data for swelling.

Boris Rubinsky, professor of the Graduate School at UC Berkeley’s Department of Mechanical Engineering, led the research team along with César A. González, a professor in Mexico at the Instituto Politécnico Nacional, Escuela Superior de Medicina (National Polytechnic Institute’s Superior School of Medicine).

“There are large populations in Mexico and the world that do not have adequate access to advanced medical imaging, either because it is too costly or the facilities are far away,” said González. “This technology is inexpensive, it can be used in economically disadvantaged parts of the world and in rural areas that lack industrial infrastructure, and it may substantially reduce the cost and change the paradigm of medical diagnostics. We have also shown that the technology could be combined with cell phones for remote diagnostics.”

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Discovery shows positive effects of drugs that may lead to effective new therapies for A-T.

Richard Gatti, UCLA

Led by Dr. Peiyee Lee and Dr. Richard Gatti, researchers at the Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at UCLA have used induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells to advance disease-in-a-dish modeling of a rare genetic disorder, ataxia telangiectasia (A-T).

Their discovery shows the positive effects of drugs that may lead to effective new treatments for the neurodegenerative disease. IPS cells are made from patients’ skin cells, rather than from embryos, and they can become any type of cells, including brain cells, in the laboratory. The study appears online ahead of print in the journal Nature Communications.

People with A-T begin life with neurological deficits that become devastating through progressive loss of function in a part of the brain called the cerebellum, which leads to severe difficulty with movement and coordination. A-T patients also suffer frequent infections due to their weakened immune systems and have an increased risk for cancer. The disease is caused by lost function in a gene, ATM, that normally repairs damaged DNA in the cells and preserves normal function.

Developing a human neural cell model to understand A-T’s neurodegenerative process — and create a platform for testing new treatments — was critical because the disease presents differently in humans and laboratory animals. Scientists commonly use mouse models to study A-T, but mice with the disease do not experience the more debilitating effects that humans do. In mice with A-T, the cerebellum appears normal and they do not exhibit the obvious degeneration seen in the human brain.

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UC San Diego professor Michael Sailor leads multidisciplinary team.

DARPA, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, has awarded $6 million to a team of researchers to develop nanotechnology therapies for the treatment of traumatic brain injury and associated infections.

Led by professor Michael J. Sailor, Ph.D., from UC San Diego, the award brings together a multidisciplinary team of renowned experts in laboratory research, translational investigation and clinical medicine, including Erkki Ruoslahti, M.D., Ph.D., of Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute, Sangeeta N. Bhatia, M.D., Ph.D., of Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and Clark C. Chen, M.D., Ph.D., of UC San Diego School of Medicine.

Ballistics injuries that penetrate the skull have amounted to 18 percent of battlefield wounds sustained by men and women who served in the campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to the most recent estimate from the Joint Theater Trauma Registry, a compilation of data collected during Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom.

“A major contributor to the mortality associated with a penetrating brain injury is the elevated risk of intracranial infection,” said Chen, a neurosurgeon with UC San Diego Health System, noting that projectiles drive contaminated foreign materials into neural tissue.

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Discovery could aid understanding of brain disruptions that occur in stroke, other disorders.

Johannes Hell, UC Davis

When brain cells are overwhelmed by an influx of too many calcium molecules, they shut down the channels through which these molecules enter the cells. Until now, the “stop” signal mechanism that cells use to control the molecular traffic was unknown.

In the new issue of the journal Neuron, UC Davis Health System scientists report that they have identified the mechanism. Their findings are relevant to understanding the molecular causes of the disruption of brain functioning that occurs in stroke and other neurological disorders.

“Too much calcium influx clearly is part of the neuronal dysfunction in Alzheimer’s disease and causes the neuronal damage during and after a stroke. It also contributes to chronic pain,” said Johannes W. Hell, professor of pharmacology at UC Davis. Hell headed the research team that identified the mechanism that stops the flow of calcium molecules, which are also called ions, into the specialized brain cells known as neurons.

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Discovery advances understanding of how humans predict trajectory of moving objects.

If the brain didn’t compensate for our visual processing delay, we would get hit by balls and other moving objects.

How does San Francisco Giants slugger Pablo Sandoval swat a 95 mph fastball, or tennis icon Venus Williams see the oncoming ball, let alone return her sister Serena’s 120 mph serves? For the first time, vision scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, have pinpointed how the brain tracks fast-moving objects.

The discovery advances our understanding of how humans predict the trajectory of moving objects when it can take one-tenth of a second for the brain to process what the eye sees.

That 100-millisecond holdup means that in real time, a tennis ball moving at 120 mph would have already advanced 15 feet before the brain registers the ball’s location. If our brains couldn’t make up for this visual processing delay, we’d be constantly hit by balls, cars and more.

Thankfully, the brain “pushes” forward moving objects so we perceive them as further along in their trajectory than the eye can see, researchers said.

“For the first time, we can see this sophisticated prediction mechanism at work in the human brain,” said Gerrit Maus, a postdoctoral fellow in psychology at UC Berkeley and lead author of the paper published today in the journal, Neuron.

A clearer understanding of how the brain processes visual input – in this case life in motion – can eventually help in diagnosing and treating myriad disorders, including those that impair motion perception. People who cannot perceive motion cannot predict locations of objects and therefore cannot perform tasks as simple as pouring a cup of coffee or crossing a road, researchers said.

This study is also likely to have a major impact on other studies of the brain.  Its findings come just as the Obama Administration initiates its push to create a Brain Activity Map Initiative, which will further pave the way for scientists to create a roadmap of human brain circuits, as was done for the Human Genome Project.

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UCSF uses brain mapping technology to predict long-term effects.

A new application of an existing medical imaging technology could help predict long-term damage in patients with traumatic brain injury, according to a recent UC San Francisco study.

The authors of the study analyzed brain scans using applied rapid automated resting state magnetoencephalography (MEG) imaging, a technique used to map brain activity by recording magnetic fields produced by natural electrical currents in the brain. They discovered “abnormally decreased functional connectivity” – or possible long-term brain damage – could persist years after a person suffers even a mild form of traumatic brain injury.

“We were hoping that areas of abnormal brain activity would match up with some of the functional measures such as patients’ symptoms after injury, and we saw such correlation,” said senior author Pratik Mukherjee, M.D., Ph.D., associate professor in residence at the UCSF School of Medicine.

In a study published on April 19 in the Journal of Neurosurgery, UCSF researchers analyzed brain connectivity data on 14 male and seven female patients, whose median age was 29. Brain connectivity refers to a pattern of causal interactions between specific parts within a nervous system. Eleven patients had mild, one had moderate and three had severe forms of traumatic brain injury. Six patients suffered no brain injury.

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