News Briefs

Researchers provide insight into how the brain multitasks while walking

MoBI avatar with human traces.

Courtesy: Edward Freedman, Ph.D.

New research turns the old idiom about not being able to walk and chew gum on its head. In a paper published in NeuroImage, scientists have shown that the healthy brain is able to multitask while walking without sacrificing how either activity is accomplished.

During these experiments, Edward Freedman, Ph.D., an associate professor of Neuroscience who led the study, used a Mobile Brain/Body Imaging system, or MoBI, located in the Frederick J. and Marion A. Schindler Cognitive Neurophysiology Lab. The platform combines virtual reality, EEG, and motion capture technology. While participants walk on a treadmill or manipulate objects on a table, 16 high speed cameras record the position markers placed on the person's body with millimeter precision, while simultaneously measuring their brain activity. Researchers found that walking patterns of participants improved when they performed a cognitive task at the same time. This suggests stability improved while walking and performing another task, compared to when the participants solely focused on walking.

“Looking at these findings to understand how a young healthy brain is able to switch tasks will give us better insight into what’s going awry in a brain with a neurodegenerative disease like Alzheimer’s disease,” said Freedman.

A key to restoring sight may be held in a drug that treats alcoholism

Image: A mouse retinal ganglion cell (green), which becomes hyperactive in degenerative vision disorders. Other retinal cell types are labeled in blue. Hyperactivity interferes with the proper transfer of signals from the retina to the brain. Richard Kramer's lab at UC Berkeley has discovered what causes hyperactivity and has identified drugs that interfere with the process, and by doing so, improve vision.

Image credit: Shubhash Yadav, Kramer lab

Researchers may have found a way to revive some vision loss caused by age-related macular degeneration – the leading cause of blindness – and the inherited disease retinitis pigmentosa (RP), a rare genetic disorder that causes the breakdown and loss of cells in the retina. The drug disulfiram – marketed under the brand name Antabuse – used to treat alcoholism, may hold the key to restoring this vision loss.

The research published in Science Advances involved mice and found disulfiram helped restore some vision by suppressing the sensory noise in the inner retina caused by dying photoreceptors in the outer retina. This is brought on by the progression of outer retinal degeneration (such as age-related macular degeneration or RP), in which the light-sensing cells called “photoreceptors” slowly die over years. In past research, as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, Michael Telias, Ph.D., assistant professor of Ophthalmology, Neuroscience, and Center for Visual Science at the University of Rochester Medical Center, and first author on the paper, found that as photoreceptors die off it disrupts the function of the inner retina. This causes the sensory noise that ultimately becomes a barrier between the surviving photoreceptors and the brain. This latest research, led by Richard Kramer, Ph.D., professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and Michael Goard, Ph.D., assistant professor at University of California, Santa Barbara, found that disulfiram can target that sensory noise, allowing the surviving photoreceptors in the outer retina to complete the signal to the brain and ultimately restore some vision.

Researchers find new clues in the brain linking pain and food

It has long been known that there is an association between food and pain, as people with chronic pain often struggle with their weight. Researchers at the Del Monte Institute for Neuroscience may have found an explanation in a new study that suggests that circuitry in the brain responsible for motivation and pleasure is impacted when someone experiences pain. In the study published in PLOS ONE, researchers looked at the brain’s response to sugar and fat. They found that none of the patients experienced eating behavior changes with sugar, but they did with fat.

Patients with acute lower back pain who later recovered were found to most likely to lose pleasure in eating pudding and show disrupted satiety signals – the communication from the digestive system to the brain – while those with acute lower back pain whose pain persisted at one year did not initially have the same change in their eating behavior. But chronic lower back pain patients did report that eventually foods high in fat and carbohydrates, like ice cream and cookies, became problematic for them over time and brain scans showed disrupted satiety signals.

“It is important to note, this change in food liking did not change their caloric intake,” said Paul Geha, M.D., assistant professor of Psychiatry, Neurology, and Neuroscience, who lead this study and first authored a previous study published in PAIN that recent research is building on. “These findings suggest obesity in patients with chronic pain may not be caused by lack of movement but maybe they change how they eat.”

Researcher develops new methods to understand how the brain responds to sounds – including singing

New research has identified neurons in the brain that ‘light up’ to the sound of singing, but do not respond to any other type of music. Assistant Professor of Neuroscience and Biostatistics and Computational Biology Samuel Norman- Haignere, Ph.D., with the Del Monte Institute is first author on the paper in Current Biology that details these findings. “The work provides evidence for relatively fine-grained segregation of function within the auditory cortex, in a way that aligns with an intuitive distinction within music,” Norman-Haignere said. The singing-specific area of the brain is located in the temporal lobe, near regions that are selective for speech and music. Researchers worked with epilepsy patients who had electrodes implanted in their brain (electrocorticography or ECOG) in order to localize seizure-related activity as a part of their clinical care. ECOG enables more precise measurements of electrical activity in the brain.

In previous research, fMRI was used to scan the brains of participants as they listened to different types of speech and music. Norman-Haignere combined the fMRI data from this prior study in order to map the locations of song-selective neural populations, which were identified in their new ECOG study.

Nancy Kanwisher, Ph.D., and Josh McDermott, Ph.D., of MIT's McGovern Institute for Brain Research and Center for Brains, Minds and Machine are co-senior authors of the study.

Experimental gene therapy targets Duchenne muscular dystrophy

Emma Ciafaloni, M.D., with the UR Medicine Pediatric Neuromuscular Medicine Program, talks with Charlie Prior, 6. Prior is one of the first children in the U.S. to be enrolled in the new gene therapy study.

Children in Rochester were among the first in the U.S. to receive an experimental treatment for Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD). University of Rochester Medical Center was one of the first three sites in the nation to start dosing patients in a phase 3 placebo-controlled clinical trial for a gene therapy being developed by Sarepta Therapeutics for children with DMD.

Emma Ciafaloni, M.D., a neuromuscular neurologist with the URMC department of Neurology and Golisano Children’s Hospital, is leading the Rochester study site. The study is part of an accelerating trend of clinical trials involving gene therapies that could transform how we treat a number of devastating childhood neurological disorders.

Researchers restore brain immune system function after prenatal exposure to environmental toxin

Researchers show that exposure to the industrial byproduct TCDD in utero could cause the brain’s immune system to go awry later in life, damaging important brain circuits, and potentially giving rise to neurodevelopmental disorders, such as autism and ADHD. TCDD is primarily released into the environment by vehicle exhaust and burning wood, and low levels of the toxin are found in air, soil, and food. The most common way people are exposed is through consumption of meat, dairy, and fish.

In the same study, recently published in the journal Brain, Behavior, and Immunity, researchers also found that pharmacological manipulation could restore the function of microglia, important cells in the brain’s immune system.

“This suggests that defects in microglia function resulting from prenatal exposures can be reversed later in life, indicating a possible additional therapeutic avenue for neurodevelopmental disorders,” said Rebecca Lowery, Ph.D., assistant research professor of Neuroscience at the Del Monte Institute, and co-first author of the study.

Huntington’s study recognized for potential to ‘Shape Medicine’

The journal Nature Medicine has identified a phase 3 study of pridopidine as a treatment for Huntington’s disease as one of 11 clinical trials that will shape medicine in 2022. The URMC Clinical Trials Coordination Center is providing global operational support for the study, which is being conducted at more than 50 sites across the U.S., Canada, the U.K., and Europe.

The journal notes that the PROOF-HD clinical trial is one of several ongoing studies of pridopidine as a potential therapy for Huntington’s, ALS, and other neurodegenerative diseases. Pridopidine is an oral small-molecule that binds and activates the Sigma-1 receptor (S1R), which is present at high levels within the brain. By activating S1R, the drug helps boost production of brain-derived neurotrophic factor, a protein with neuroprotective properties. These protein levels are found at reduced levels in people with Huntington’s disease.