Researchers Identify Potential Therapeutic Target For Improving Long-Term Memory

Image via Wikipedia
Researchers from Mount Sinai School of Medicine have identified a therapy that may enhance memory and prevent the loss of long-term memory. The research is published in the January 27th issue of Nature.

Led by Cristina Alberini, PhD, Professor of Neuroscience at Mount Sinai, the research team evaluated how a protein called insulin-like growth factor II (IGF-II), a gene expressed during brain development that declines with aging, impacts memory formation and retention.

IGF-II is enriched in the adult brain in several areas, including the hippocampus and cortex, which are known to be important for memory formation. Researchers injected the hippocampus of rats with the protein and found that IGF-II significantly improved long-term memory. The team also found that IGF-II levels increased after learning, and that when that increase was blocked long-lasting memories could not form.

"The implications of these data are far-reaching and give us new clues about how to investigate memory loss and forgetfulness in people with cognitive impairment, like those with Alzheimer's disease, stroke, or dementia," said Dr. Alberini.

Prior to this study, very little, if anything, was known about IGF-II in adult brain functions. The researchers tested the impact of injecting IGF-II into rats after "inhibitory avoidance learning," in which the rats learn to avoid an unpleasant experience. They found that compared to control groups, the rats injected with IGF-II had a much stronger memory retention. In addition, the rats maintained an elevated memory for several weeks, while the control group showed diminished memory over the same period of time.

In collaboration with Robert Blitzer, PhD, Associate Professor of Pharmacology and Systems Therapeutics and Psychiatry at Mount Sinai, the research team also evaluated the impact of IGF-II at the cellular level. They found that IGF-II had an impact on long-term potentiation (LTP). LTP is a type of synaptic plasticity, or the change in strength of the points of contact between nerve cells, that is believed to be critical for long-term memory formation. Dr. Blitzer and his team found that IGF-II promoted stable LTP, strengthening signal transmission between nerve cells and maintaining it for a longer period of time.

"This study is the first step to understanding the benefits of IGF-II," said Dr. Alberini. "We have identified some of the mechanisms associated with this effect and look forward to further studying them and exploring the clinical relevance of IGF-II."

This study is supported by a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health. In addition to Drs. Alberini and Blitzer, co-authors from Mount Sinai's Department of Neuroscience include Dillon Chen, MD/PhD candidate; Sarah Stern, graduate student, and Dhananjay Bambah-Mukku, MD/PhD candidate, and Gabriella Pollonini, a Senior Scientist all with Dr. Alberini in the department of Neuroscience, and Bernadette Saunier-Rebori, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow in the department of Pharmacology and Systems Therapeutics, is also a co-author.

Source:
Mount Sinai Medical Center

 

Health Discovery: Lift Weights for Stronger Muscles, Stronger Brains - AARP Bulletin

by: Candy Sagon | from: AARP Bulletin

For older women, the type of exercise you do may be more important than how often you do it.

That's the message of a surprising new study by Canadian researchers that found that women who started a once-a-week strength-training program were more likely to stick with it — and reap the physical and mental benefits — than those who started a twice-a-week program.

More importantly, older women who built muscle strength through biceps curls, leg lifts, squats and the like showed much greater improvement in mental focus and ability to make decisions and resolve conflicts than women who did only balance and toning exercises.
Continue Reading

All Cancer Therapies May Impair Memory from MedPage Today

By Ed Susman, Contributing Writer, MedPage Today

Cognitive impairments associated with breast cancer treatment are not limited only to "chemobrain," but may occur with radiation or hormonal therapies as well, a researcher said here.

About 14% of individuals who had undergone therapy for a variety of cancer diagnoses complained of post-therapy memory loss compared with 8% of individuals who had not received cancer treatments (P=0.001),

"Chemobrain is sort of a misnomer, because we observed this memory-loss phenomenon among people who have undergone chemotherapy, radiation therapy or hormonal therapy for treatment of various types of cancer," Jean-Pierre told MedPage Today during a poster session here at the American Association for Cancer Research Conference on the Science of Cancer Health Disparities.
Full Article

TIME GOES BY | Let Me Tell You About Getting Old

Image by ebby via Flickrby Ronni Bennett

As we often say, Bette Davis knew whereof she spoke when she said, “Old age ain't for sissies.” She had the throw pillow with that original saying made when, in a 13-month period, she went through a double mastectomy, a stroke and a broken collarbone.

We all hope we won't face any of the possible serious diseases and conditions the accumulation of years might inflict upon us – and certainly not so many in such a short space of time as hit that brave woman. But there are plenty of less debilitating – and sometimes demeaning - afflictions we are required to navigate and make the best of. To name a few:

• Being put out to pasture from the workforce before we intended
• Crossing that divide from mid-age to invisibility
• Mysterious aches and pains with no apparent cause or remedy
• Falling asleep during a movie no matter how good it is
• Being seated at a table near the rest room even when the restaurant is all but empty
• Being referred to as “dearie” by way too many young people
• Listening to a mean-spirited former senator compare elders to cows

None of what you've just read matters. It is all just a delaying action before getting to this one:

• Repeated embarrassment due to short-term memory problems

On Monday, I admitted to being embarrassed about how long it had taken me to update the Elderbloggers List. That lapse had nothing to do with memory and everything to do with laziness.

But now I must cop to a more embarrassing shortcoming. I put a great deal of effort into updating that list – it's not something one would forget, or so I thought.

I spent most of a day cleaning the list of abandoned blogs, adding new ones alphabetically and coding it all into html. Then I wrote the accompanying story for Monday and set it to post automatically at 5:30AM.

I carefully saved the new html document to my temporary file, where I keep things I will need in the near future, ready to copy and paste onto its page on Monday morning so that you, dear readers, would have that new list ready to use with the announcement of it.

Then, because I know my short-term memory is non-existent, I wrote a note to myself – in red, block letters on my Monday to-do list – to post that new List first thing.

Here's what I now recall about Monday morning: brushed my teeth, turned on the computer, fed the cat, started the electric tea kettle, checked email, made the coffee, READ THE TO-DO LIST – and got on with the day. A little later, in a rare fit of computer housekeeping, I deleted all the files in my temporary file.

Throughout the day, I neatly checked off everything on the to-do list WITHOUT EVER AGAIN SEEING THE BIG RED NOTE at the top of the page. Somehow, my eyes went right past it. For the rest of the week, I was happy in my ignorance, and pleased with myself that I'd gotten that list so neat and tidy.

That is, until yesterday when I needed to track down a certain elderblog. I went to that shiny, new list online and was horrified to see, instead, all those abandoned blogs and none of the new ones.

Did you catch my other memory mistake three paragraphs up? Yes? No? Here it is in its utter stupidity: the new list had been in the now-deleted temporary file.

Ooph - you know that feeling when something has gone terribly wrong and there is nothing you can do about it? And then you realize, too, it's all your own fault?

Look at it and weep for me; all that list work now needs to be repeated.

So not only has my short-term memory turned to crap – I already knew that – but now I must think up a new way to remind myself of important things that is better than the big, fat, red notes I've used for decades.

It ain't easy getting old.

TIME GOES BY | Let Me Tell You About Getting Old

Related articles by Zemanta

• What Are the Causes of Short Term Memory Loss? (brighthub.com)
• 8 Tips for Improving Your Memory (psychcentral.com)

Study Links Cellular Motors To Memory

Functioning much like gears in a machine, cellular motor proteins are critical to dynamic functions throughout the body, including muscle contraction, cell migration and cellular growth processes. Now, neuroscientists from UC Irvine and the Florida campus of The Scripps Research Institute report that motor proteins also play a critical role in the stabilization of long-term memories. The findings add an unexpected dimension to the story of how memories are encoded and suggest new targets for therapeutic interventions.

UCI's Christopher Rex and Gavin Rumbaugh at Scripps found that myosin II proteins, more commonly studied in muscle contraction and cell migration, are critical for functional brain plasticity and learning. The work builds on a fundamental theory of memory - posed over 25 years ago by UCI neuroscientist Gary Lynch - that memories are the product of structural rearrangements of synapses in the brain.

"We suspected that motor proteins are involved in synaptic plasticity," said Rumbaugh, an assistant professor of neuroscience. "Now that we know that they are, we can begin to investigate how the vast literature on motor proteins from other cell types may generalize to neurons."

The study results appear in Neuron.

Myosin II motors are one of the most studied protein complexes in the human body. They are best known for interacting with actin filaments to control initiate forces within cellular compartments.

"Cells are constructed like buildings," said Rex, a Kauffman Foundation Fellow in anatomy & neurobiology. "Actin can be thought of as the building's frame, meaning it determines the scale and design of the structure. Myosin II would then be like a crane moving the beams into place. The main difference being that myosin II is poised to both tear down and rebuild the structure with a completely different design at any minute."

A core tenant of contemporary theory is that the sizes and shapes of dendritic spines, small protrusions at the receiving end of chemical transmission at synapses, are critical for determining synaptic strength.

"We know that appropriate patterns of neuronal activity can cause structural changes to these elements spines, now our major focus is to understand how this works," said Lynch, who contributed to the study.
Having discovered that a submicroscopic motor drives synaptic reorganization, the UCI and Scripps research groups believe they are substantially closer to understanding how to selectively enhance memory formation, and thereby treat the memory problems associated with aging, post-traumaticstress, mental retardation and age-related neurodegenerative diseases.

Christine Gall, Eniko Kramar, Lulu Chen and Yousheng Jia of UCI; Cristin Gavin and Courtney Miller of Scripps; Maria Rubio of the University of Alabama, Birmingham; Richard Huganir of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine; and Nicholas Muzyczka of the University of Florida contributed to this work, which received support from the National Institutes of Health; the University of Alabama, Birmingham; the McKnight Brain Institute; Alabama Health Sciences Foundation; and the Kauffman Foundation.

Source: Tom Vasich - University of California - Irvine

Computer Algorithm Able To 'Read' Memories

Image via Wikipedia

(Medical News Today) Computer programs have been able to predict which of three short films a person is thinking about, just by looking at their brain activity. The research, conducted by scientists at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at UCL (University College London), provides further insight into how our memories are recorded.

Professor Eleanor Maguire led this Wellcome Trust-funded study, an extension of work published last year which showed how spatial memories - in that case, where a volunteer was standing in a virtual reality room - are recorded in regular patterns of activity in the hippocampus, the area of the brain responsible for learning and memory.

"In our previous experiment, we were looking at basic memories, at someone's location in an environment," says Professor Maguire. "What is more interesting is to look at 'episodic' memories - the complex, everyday memories that include much more information on where we are, what we are doing and how we feel."

To explore how such memories are recorded, the researchers showed ten volunteers three short films and asked them to memorise what they saw. The films were very simple, sharing a number of similar features - all included a woman carrying out an everyday task in a typical urban street, and each film was the same length, seven seconds long. For example, one film showed a woman drinking coffee from a paper cup in the street before discarding the cup in a litter bin; another film showed a (different) woman posting a letter.

The volunteers were then asked to recall each of the films in turn whilst inside an fMRI scanner, which records brain activity by measuring changes in blood flow within the brain.

A computer algorithm then studied the patterns and had to identify which film the volunteer was recalling purely by looking at the pattern of their brain activity. The results are published in the journal Current Biology.

"The algorithm was able to predict correctly which of the three films the volunteer was recalling significantly above what would be expected by chance," explains Martin Chadwick, lead author of the study. "This suggests that our memories are recorded in a regular pattern."
Continue Reading

Related articles by Zemanta

• Computer program 'reads' minds (cbc.ca)
• Mind-reading experiment uses brain scans to eavesdrop on thoughts (guardian.co.uk)
• Scan 'can distinguish memories' (news.bbc.co.uk)
• fMRI Now Used as Rudimentary Memory Reading Device (medgadget.com)
• Telepathic computer can read your mind (telegraph.co.uk)

New Synthetic Magnesium Supplement Improves Memory And Staves Off Age-Related Memory Loss

from Medical News Today

Those who live in industrialized countries have easy access to healthy food and nutritional supplements, but magnesium deficiencies are still common. That's a problem because new research from Tel Aviv University suggests that magnesium, a key nutrient for the functioning of memory, may be even more critical than previously thought for the neurons of children and healthy brain cells in adults.
Continue Reading

Related articles by Zemanta

• Study: Magnesium Important for Memory (grantlawrence.blogspot.com)
• Improve Your Memory With Magnesium (eddieoneverything.com)
• Magnesium May Improve Memory (biosingularity.wordpress.com)

Alcohol Use And Cognitive Decline Among The Elderly

from Medical News Today

Studies of alcohol use and cognition among the elderly are rare and have mixed results. A study of drinking among the elderly in Brazil has found that heavy alcohol use is associated with more memory and cognitive problems than mild-to-moderate alcohol use, especially among women.

Continue Reading

First Evidence That Blueberry Juice Improves Memory In Older Adults

Image via Wikipedia

from Medical News Today

Scientists are reporting the first evidence from human research that blueberries - one of the richest sources of healthful antioxidants and other so-called phytochemicals - improve memory. They said the study establishes a basis for comprehensive human clinical trials to determine whether blueberries really deserve their growing reputation as a memory enhancer. A report on the study appears in ACS' Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, a bi-weekly publication.

Continue Reading

Related articles by Zemanta

• Blueberry juice for better memory (boingboing.net)
• Stock Up: Blueberry Juice for Better Memory (blisstree.com)

Older Brains Make Good Use Of 'Useless' Information

Image via Wikipedia

from Medical News Today

A new study has found promising evidence that the older brain's weakened ability to filter out irrelevant information may actually give aging adults a memory advantage over their younger counterparts.

Continue Reading

UCSB Scientists Discover How The Brain Encodes Memories At A Cellular Level

Image by Mikey G Ottawa via Flickr

Scientists at UC Santa Barbara have made a major discovery in how the brain encodes memories. The finding, published in the December 24 issue of the journal Neuron, could eventually lead to the development of new drugs to aid memory.
Continue Reading

Related articles by Zemanta

• How are memories saved? (scientificamerican.com)
• Understanding how we make memories (tech.bl0x.info)
• MCG scientists decode memory-forming brain cell conversations (scienceblog.com)

Kim Peek, Inspiration for ‘Rain Man,’ Dies at 58 - Obituary (Obit) - NYTimes.com

By BRUCE WEBER

Mr. Peek was not autistic — not all savants are autistic and not all autistics are savants — but he was born with severe brain abnormalities that impaired his physical coordination and made ordinary reasoning difficult. He could not dress himself or brush his teeth without help. He found metaphoric language incomprehensible and conceptualization baffling.

But with an astonishing skill that allowed him to read facing pages of a book at once — one with each eye — he read as many as 12,000 volumes. Even more remarkable, he could remember what he had read.

Indeed, Mr. Peek, who died Dec. 19 at home in Salt Lake City, had perhaps the world’s most capacious memory for facts. He was 58. The cause was a heart attack, said his father, Fran Peek.

Almost all documented savants — people with an extraordinary depth of knowledge and the ability to recall it — have been restricted in their expertise to specific fields like mathematics, chess, art or music. But Mr. Peek had a wide range of interests and could instantly answer the most arcane questions on subjects as diverse as history, sports, music, geography and movies.
Read More

Smoking Appears Linked with Risk for Poor Memory in Middle Age

Smoking is linked to an increased risk for memory deficit and cognitive decline in middle age in an analysis based on data from Whitehall II, a large, prospective cohort study. The findings by Séverine Sabia, MSc, at the Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale, in Villejuif, France, and colleagues, are published in the June 9 issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine. Compared with study participants who had never smoked, after adjustment for other confounding factors, smokers had a 37% increased risk of having scores in the lowest quintile on a memory test (they were more likely to recall less than 5 of 20 words), Ms. Sabia told Medscape Psychiatry. The full article is available on Medscape.