Posts tagged neuroscience
In contrast to evidence that the amygdala stimulates stress responses in adults, researchers at Yerkes National Primate Research Center, Emory University have found that the amygdala has an inhibitory effect on stress hormones during the early development of nonhuman primates.
The results are published this week in Journal of Neuroscience.
The amygdala is a region of the brain known to be important for responses to threatening situations and learning about threats. Alterations in the amygdala have been reported in psychiatric disorders such as depression, anxiety disorders like PTSD, schizophrenia and autism spectrum disorder. However, much of what is known about the amygdala comes from research on adults.
"Our findings fit into an emerging theme in neuroscience research: that during childhood, there is a switch in amygdala function and connectivity with other brain regions, particularly the prefrontal cortex,” says Mar Sanchez, PhD, neuroscience researcher at Yerkes and associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Emory University School of Medicine. The first author of the paper is postdoctoral fellow Jessica Raper, PhD.
The findings are part of a larger longitudinal study at Yerkes National Primate Research Center, examining how amygdala damage within the first month of life affects the development of social and emotional behaviors and neuroendocrine systems in rhesus monkeys from infancy through adulthood. The laboratories of Sanchez and Yerkes researchers Jocelyne Bachevalier, PhD and Kim Wallen, PhD are collaborating on this project.
Previous investigations at Yerkes found that as infants, monkeys with amygdala damage showed higher levels of the stress hormone cortisol. This surprising result contrasted with previous research on adults, which showed that amygdala damage results in lower levels of cortisol.
The team hypothesized that damage to the amygdala generated changes in the HPA axis: a network of endocrine interactions between the hypothalamus within the brain, the pituitary and the adrenal glands, critical for reactions to stress.
"We wanted to examine whether the alterations in stress hormones seen during infancy persisted, and what brain changes were responsible for them," Sanchez says. "In studies of adults, the amygdala and its connections are fully formed at the time of the manipulation, but here neither the amygdala or its connections were fully matured when the damage occurred."
In the current paper, the authors demonstrated that in contrast with adult animals with amygdala damage, juvenile monkeys with early amygdala damage had increased levels of cortisol in the blood, compared to controls. In their cerebrospinal fluid, they also had elevated levels of corticotropin releasing factor (CRF), the neuropeptide that initiates the stress response in the brain. Elevated CRF and cortisol are linked to anxiety and emotional dysregulation in patients with mood disorders.
Despite the increased levels of stress hormones, monkeys with early amygdala damage exhibit a blunted emotional reactivity to threats, including decreased fear and aggression, and reduced anxiety in response to stress. Still, monkeys with neonatal amygdala damage remain competent in interacting with others in their large social groups. These findings are consistent with reports of human patients with damage to the amygdala, Raper says.
"We speculate that the rich social environment provided to the monkeys promotes compensatory mechanisms in cortical regions implicated in the regulation of social behavior," she says. "But neonatal amygdala damage seems more detrimental for the development of stress neuroendocrine circuits in other areas of the brain."
The investigators plan to follow the animals into adulthood to investigate the long-term effects of early amygdala damage on stress hormones, behavior and physiological systems possibly affected by chronically high cortisol levels, such as immune, growth and reproductive functions.
(Source: news.emory.edu)
Filed under amygdala stress cortisol prefrontal cortex HPA axis neuroscience science
Our connection to content
Using neuroscience tools, Innerscope Research explores the connections between consumers and media.
It’s often said that humans are wired to connect: The neural wiring that helps us read the emotions and actions of other people may be a foundation for human empathy.
But for the past eight years, MIT Media Lab spinout Innerscope Research has been using neuroscience technologies that gauge subconscious emotions by monitoring brain and body activity to show just how powerfully we also connect to media and marketing communications.
“We are wired to connect, but that connection system is not very discriminating. So while we connect with each other in powerful ways, we also connect with characters on screens and in books, and, we found, we also connect with brands, products, and services,” says Innerscope’s chief science officer, Carl Marci, a social neuroscientist and former Media Lab researcher.
With this core philosophy, Innerscope — co-founded at MIT by Marci and Brian Levine MBA ’05 — aims to offer market research that’s more advanced than traditional methods, such as surveys and focus groups, to help content-makers shape authentic relationships with their target consumers.
“There’s so much out there, it’s hard to make something people will notice or connect to,” Levine says. “In a way, we aim to be the good matchmaker between content and people.”
Read more
Filed under advertising neuroimaging hippocampus amygdala prefrontal cortex precuneus empathy neuroscience science
The area of the brain involved in multitasking and ways to train it have been identified by a research team at the IUGM Institut universitaire de gériatrie de Montréal and the University of Montreal. The research includes a model to better predict the effectiveness of this training. Cooking while having a conversation, watching a movie while browsing the Web, or driving while listening to a radio show – multitasking is an essential skill in our daily lives. Unfortunately, it decreases with age, which makes it harder for seniors to keep up, causes them stress, and decreases their confidence. Many commercial software applications promise to improve this ability through exercises. But are these exercises truly effective, and how do they work on the brain? The team addresses these issues in two papers published in AGE and PLOS ONE.
Targeted Action for a Specific Result
The findings are important because they may help scientists develop better targeted cognitive stimulation programs or improve existing training programs. Specialists sometimes question the usefulness of exercises that may be ineffective simply because they are poorly structured. “To improve your cardiovascular fitness, most people know you need to run laps on the track and not work on your flexibility. But the way targeted training correlates to cognition has been a mystery for a long time. Our work shows that there is also an association between the type of cognitive training performed and the resulting effect. This is true for healthy seniors who want to improve their attention or memory and is particularly important for patients who suffer from damage in specific areas of the brain. We therefore need to better understand the ways to activate certain areas of the brain and target this action to get specific results,” explained Sylvie Belleville, who led the research.
Researchers are now better able to map these effects on the functioning of very specific areas of the brain. Will we eventually be able to adapt the structure of our brains through highly targeted training? “We have a long road ahead to get to that point, and we don’t know for sure if that would indeed be a desirable outcome. However, our research findings can be used right away to improve the daily lives of aging adults as well as people who suffer from brain damage,” Dr. Belleville said.
The Right Combination of Plasticity and Attentional Control
In one of the studies, 48 seniors were randomly allocated to training that either worked on plasticity and attentional control or only involved simple practice. The researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging to evaluate the impact of this training on various types of attentional tasks and on brain function. The team showed that training on plasticity and attentional control helped the participants develop their ability to multitask. However, performing two tasks simultaneously was not what improved this skill. For the exercises, the research participants instead had to modulate the amount of attention given to each task. They were first asked to devote 80% of their attention to task A and 20% to task B and then change the ratio to 50:50 or 20:80. This training was the only type that increased functioning in the middle prefrontal region, or the area known to be responsible for multitasking abilities and whose activation decreases with age. The researchers used this data to create a predictive model of the effects of cognitive training on the brain based on the subjects’ characteristics.
(Source: eurekalert.org)
Filed under multitasking aging cognitive decline cognitive training plasticity neuroscience science
Spontaneous gesture can help children learn, whether they use a spoken language or sign language, according to a new report.
Previous research by Susan Goldin-Meadow, the Beardsley Ruml Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Psychology, has found that gesture helps children develop their language, learning and cognitive skills. As one of the nation’s leading authorities on language learning and gesture, she has also studied how using gesture helps older children improve their mathematical skills.
Goldin-Meadow’s new study examines how gesturing contributes to language learning in hearing and in deaf children. She concludes that gesture is a flexible way of communicating, one that can work with language to communicate or, if necessary, can itself become language. The article is published online by Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B and will appear in the Sept. 19 print issue of the journal, which is a theme issue on “Language as a Multimodal Phenomenon.”
“Children who can hear use gesture along with speech to communicate as they acquire spoken language, “Goldin-Meadow said. “Those gesture-plus-word combinations precede and predict the acquisition of word combinations that convey the same notions. The findings make it clear that children have an understanding of these notions before they are able to express them in speech.”
In addition to children who learned spoken languages, Goldin-Meadow studied children who learned sign language from their parents. She found that they too use gestures as they use American Sign Language. These gestures predict learning, just like the gestures that accompany speech.
Finally, Goldin-Meadow looked at deaf children whose hearing losses prevented them from learning spoken language, and whose hearing parents had not presented them with conventional sign language. These children use homemade gesture systems, called homesign, to communicate. Homesign shares properties in common with natural languages but is not a full-blown language, perhaps because the children lack “a community of communication partners,” Goldin-Meadow writes. Nevertheless, homesign can be the “first step toward an established sign language.” In Nicaragua, individual gesture systems blossomed into a more complex, shared system when homesigners were brought together for the first time.
These findings provide insight into gesture’s contribution to learning. Gesture plays a role in learning for signers even though it is in the same modality as sign. As a result, gesture cannot aid learners simply by providing a second modality. Rather, gesture adds imagery to the categorical distinctions that form the core of both spoken and sign languages.
Goldin-Meadow concludes that gesture can be the basis for a self-made language, assuming linguistic forms and functions when other vehicles are not available. But when a conventional spoken or sign language is present, gesture works along with language, helping to promote learning.
(Source: news.uchicago.edu)
Filed under gestures language acquisition learning communication homesign neuroscience science
Children’s drawings indicate later intelligence
How 4-year old children draw pictures of a child is an indicator of intelligence at age 14, according to a study by the Institute of Psychiatry at King’s College London, published today in Psychological Science.
The researchers studied 7,752 pairs of identical and non-identical twins (a total of 15,504 children) from the Medical Research Council (MRC) funded Twins Early Development Study (TEDS), and found that the link between drawing and later intelligence was influenced by genes.
At the age of 4, children were asked by their parents to complete a ‘Draw-a-Child’ test, i.e. draw a picture of a child. Each figure was scored between 0 and 12 depending on the presence and correct quantity of features such as head, eyes, nose, mouth, ears, hair, body, arms etc. For example, a drawing with two legs, two arms, a body and head, but no facial features, would score 4. The children were also given verbal and non-verbal intelligence tests at ages 4 and 14.
The researchers found that higher scores on the Draw-a-Child test were moderately associated with higher scores of intelligence at ages 4 and 14. The correlation between drawing and intelligence was moderate at ages 4 (0.33) and 14 (0.20).
Dr Rosalind Arden, lead author of the paper from the MRC Social, Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry (SGDP) Centre at the Institute of Psychiatry at King’s College London, says: “The Draw-a-Child test was devised in the 1920’s to assess children’s intelligence, so the fact that the test correlated with intelligence at age 4 was expected.What surprised us was that it correlated with intelligence a decade later.”
“The correlation is moderate, so our findings are interesting, but it does not mean that parents should worry if their child draws badly. Drawing ability does not determine intelligence, there are countless factors, both genetic and environmental, which affect intelligence in later life.”
The researchers also measured the heritability of figure drawing. Identical twins share all their genes, whereas non-identical twins only share about 50 percent, but each pair will have a similar upbringing, family environment and access to the same materials.
Overall, at age 4, drawings from identical twins pairs were more similar to one another than drawings from non-identical twin pairs. Therefore, the researchers concluded that differences in children’s drawings have an important genetic link. They also found that drawing at age 4 and intelligence at age 14 had a strong genetic link.
Dr Arden explains: “This does not mean that there is a drawing gene – a child’s ability to draw stems from many other abilities, such as observing, holding a pencil etc. We are a long way off understanding how genes influence all these different types of behaviour.”
Dr Arden adds: “Drawing is an ancient behaviour, dating back beyond 15,000 years ago. Through drawing, we are attempting to show someone else what’s in our mind. This capacity to reproduce figures is a uniquely human ability and a sign of cognitive ability, in a similar way to writing, which transformed the human species’ ability to store information, and build a civilisation.”
Filed under intelligence child development drawing genes cognitive function psychology neuroscience science
Physically fit kids have beefier brain white matter than their less-fit peers
A new study of 9- and 10-year-olds finds that those who are more aerobically fit have more fibrous and compact white-matter tracts in the brain than their peers who are less fit. “White matter” describes the bundles of axons that carry nerve signals from one brain region to another. More compact white matter is associated with faster and more efficient nerve activity.
The team reports its findings in the open-access journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience.
“Previous studies suggest that children with higher levels of aerobic fitness show greater brain volumes in gray-matter brain regions important for memory and learning,” said University of Illinois postdoctoral researcher Laura Chaddock-Heyman, who conducted the study with kinesiology and community health professor Charles Hillman and psychology professor and Beckman Institute director Arthur Kramer. “Now for the first time we explored how aerobic fitness relates to white matter in children’s brains.”
The team used diffusion tensor imaging (DTI, also called diffusion MRI) to look at five white-matter tracts in the brains of the 24 participants. This method analyzes water diffusion into tissues. For white matter, less water diffusion means the tissue is more fibrous and compact, both desirable traits.
The researchers controlled for several variables – such as social and economic status, the timing of puberty, IQ, or a diagnosis of ADHD or other learning disabilities – that might have contributed to the reported fitness differences in the brain.
The analysis revealed significant fitness-related differences in the integrity of several white-matter tracts in the brain: the corpus callosum, which connects the brain’s left and right hemispheres; the superior longitudinal fasciculus, a pair of structures that connect the frontal and parietal lobes; and the superior corona radiata, which connect the cerebral cortex to the brain stem.
“All of these tracts have been found to play a role in attention and memory,” Chaddock-Heyman said.
The team did not test for cognitive differences in the children in this study, but previous work has demonstrated a link between improved aerobic fitness and gains in cognitive function on specific tasks and in academic settings.
“Previous studies in our lab have reported a relationship between fitness and white-matter integrity in older adults,” Kramer said. “Therefore, it appears that fitness may have beneficial effects on white matter throughout the lifespan.”
To take the findings further, the team is now two years into a five-year randomized, controlled trial to determine whether white-matter tract integrity improves in children who begin a new physical fitness routine and maintain it over time. The researchers are looking for changes in aerobic fitness, brain structure and function, and genetic regulation.
“Prior work from our laboratories has demonstrated both short- and long-term differences in the relation of aerobic fitness to brain health and cognition,” Hillman said. “However, our current randomized, controlled trial should provide the most comprehensive assessment of this relationship to date.”
The new findings add to the evidence that aerobic exercise changes the brain in ways that improve cognitive function, Chaddock-Heyman said.
“This study extends our previous work and suggests that white-matter structure may be one additional mechanism by which higher-fit children outperform their lower-fit peers on cognitive tasks and in the classroom,” she said.
Filed under white matter diffusion tensor imaging aerobic fitness cognitive function memory neuroscience science
Fish study links brain size to parental duties
Male stickleback fish that protect their young have bigger brains than counterparts that don’t care for offspring, finds a new University of British Columbia study.
Stickleback fish are well known in the animal kingdom for the fact that the male of the species, rather than the female, cares for offspring. Male sticklebacks typically have bigger brains than females and researchers wanted to find out if the difference in size might relate to their role as caregivers.
In the study, published recently in Ecology and Evolution, researchers compared regular male sticklebacks to male white sticklebacks, which do not tend to their offspring. They found evidence that this change in male behaviour – giving up caring for the young – occurred at the same time the white stickleback evolved a smaller brain.
“This suggests that regular sticklebacks have bigger brains to handle the brain power needed to care for and protect their young,” says Kieran Samuk, a PhD student in UBC’s Dept. of Zoology and the study’s lead author. “This is one of the first studies to link parental care with brain size.”
The white stickleback is a relatively young species that only diverged from other sticklebacks 10,000 years ago, offering researchers some insight into how quickly brains can evolve.
“Our study tells us that brains might change in very drastic ways in a relatively short period of time. This helps us understand how physical changes such as brain size can lead to more complex behavioural changes,” says Samuk.
Filed under stickleback brain size brain structure parental brain hypothesis fish neuroscience science
Zebrafish help to unravel Alzheimer’s disease
New fundamental knowledge about the regulation of stem cells in the nerve tissue of zebrafish embryos results in surprising insights into neurodegenerative disease processes in the human brain. A new study by scientists at VIB and KU Leuven identifies the molecules responsible for this process.
Zebrafish as a model
The zebrafish is a small fish measuring 3 to 5 cm in length, with dark stripes along the length of its body. They are originally from India, but also a popular aquarium fish. Zebrafish have several unusual characteristics that make them popular for scientific research. Zebrafish eggs are fertilized outside the body, where they develop into embryos. This process occurs very quickly: the most important organs have formed after 24 hours and the young fish have hatched after 3 days. These fish are initially transparent, making them easy to study under the microscope. Zebrafish start reproducing after only 3 months. The genetic code of humans and zebrafish is more than 90 % identical. In addition, the genetic material of these fish is easy to manipulate, meaning that they are often used as a model in the study of all sorts of diseases.
Stem cells in the brain
Evgenia Salta, scientist in the team of Bart De Strooper (VIB – KU Leuven), used zebrafish as a model in molecular brain research and discovered a previously unknown regulatory process for the development of nerve cells. Evgenia Salta explains: “The human brain contains stem cells, which are cells that have not matured into nerve cells yet, but do have the potential to do this.” Stem cells are of course crucial in the development of the brain. Similar stem cells also exist in zebrafish. Therefore, these fish form an ideal model to study the behavior of these cells. A so-called Notch signaling pathway regulates the further ripening of these cells during early embryonic development. Scientists are still largely in the dark about Notch processes in the brains of Alzheimer patients, but the research by Evgenia Salta is changing this situation.
MicroRNA
The expression of genes, which form the basis of the Notch signaling pathway, is regulated in part by microRNAs (miRNAs), which are short molecules that can inhibit or activate genes. Evgenia Salta: “We specifically studied how miRNA-132 regulates the Notch signaling pathway in stem cells.”
MiRNA-132 appears to play a role in maintaining the plasticity of the adult human brain. The adult brain still contains stem cells, but these are limited in number. The activity of miRNA-132 is reduced in diseases of the nervous system that involve the death of nerve cells, such as Alzheimer’s dementia. “We wanted to study the effect of the reduction in miRNA-132 in the nervous system. Zebrafish are an ideal model for this, because we can easily reduce levels of this miRNA in them. The development of stem cells is impaired in these altered fish. We mapped the molecules that play a role in this process”, explains Evgenia Salta.
Relevance
The concentration of miRNA-132 is also reduced in the brains of patients with Alzheimer’s disease. Therefore, the zebrafish allow you to mimic a condition that also occurs in Alzheimer’s dementia. Evgenia Salta: “To our surprise, the reduced activity of miRNA-132 in the zebrafish blocks the further ripening of stem cells into nerve cells. This new knowledge about the molecular signaling pathway that underlies this process gives us an insight into the exact blocking mechanism. Thanks to this work in zebrafish, we can now examine in detail what exactly goes wrong in the brains of patients with Alzheimer’s disease.” The research team has therefore started a follow-up study in mice and the brains of deceased patients.
Questions
As this research can raise many questions, we would you to refer in your report or article to the e-mail address that VIB has made available for this purpose. Anyone with questions about this research and other medically oriented research can contact: patienteninfo@vib.be.
Research team
This research was performed by the research team of Bart De Strooper, who is head of the Leuven Laboratory for Research into Degenerative Diseases and is affiliated with the VIB Center for the Biology of Disease.
Research
A self-organizing miR-132/Ctbp2 circuit regulates bimodal Notch signals and glial progenitor fate choice during spinal cord maturation.Salta E et al. Developmental Cell.
Filed under alzheimer's disease zebrafish stem cells miRNA-132 sirt1 neuroscience science
Stimulating nerves in your ear could improve the health of your heart, researchers have discovered.
A team at the University of Leeds used a standard TENS machine like those designed to relieve labour pains to apply electrical pulses to the tragus, the small raised flap at the front of the ear immediately in front of the ear canal.
The stimulation changed the influence of the nervous system on the heart by reducing the nervous signals that can drive failing hearts too hard.
Professor Jim Deuchars, Professor of Systems Neuroscience in the University of Leeds’ Faculty of Biological Sciences, said: “You feel a bit of a tickling sensation in your ear when the TENS machine is on, but it is painless. It is early days—so far we have been testing this on healthy subjects—but we think it does have potential to improve the health of the heart and might even become part of the treatment for heart failure.”
The researchers applied electrodes to the ears of 34 healthy people and switched on the TENS (Transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation) machines for 15-minute sessions. They monitored the variability of subjects’ heartbeats and the activity of the part of the nervous system that drives the heart. Monitoring continued for 15 minutes after the TENS machine was switched off.
Lead researcher Dr Jennifer Clancy, of the University of Leeds’ School of Biomedical Sciences, said: “The first positive effect we observed was increased variability in subjects’ heartbeats. A healthy heart does not beat like a metronome. It is continually interacting with its environment—getting a little bit faster or a bit slower depending on the demands on it. An unhealthy heart is more like a machine constantly banging out the same beat. We found that when you stimulate this nerve you get about a 20% increase in heart rate variability.”
The second positive effect was in suppressing the sympathetic nervous system, which drives heart activity using adrenaline.
Dr Clancy said: “We measured the nerve activity directly and found that it reduced by about 50% when we stimulated the ear. This is important because if you have heart disease or heart failure, you tend to have increased sympathetic activity. This drives your heart to work hard, constricts your arteries and causes damage. A lot of treatments for heart failure try to stop that sympathetic activity—beta-blockers, for instance, block the action of the hormones that implement these signals. Using the TENS, we saw a reduction of the nervous activity itself.”
The researchers found significant residual effects, with neither heart rate variability or sympathetic nerve activity returning to the baseline 15 minutes after the TENS machine had been switched off.
The technique works by stimulating a major nerve called the vagus, which has an important role in regulating vital organs such as the heart. There is a sensory branch of the vagus in the outer ear and, by sending electrical current down the nerves and into the brain, researchers were able to influence outflows from the brain that regulate the heart. Vagal nerve stimulation has previously been used to treat conditions including epilepsy.
Professor Deuchars said: “We now need to understand how big and how lasting the residual effect on the heart is and whether this can help patients with heart problems, probably alongside their usual treatments. The next stage will be to conduct a pre-clinical study in heart failure patients.”
(Source: eurekalert.org)
Filed under TENS vagus nerve nerve stimulation sympathetic nervous system heart rate neuroscience science
Many people listen to loud music without realizing that this can affect their hearing. This could lead to difficulties in understanding speech during age-related hearing loss which affects up to half of people over the age of 65.
New research led by the University of Leicester has examined the cellular mechanisms that underlie hearing loss and tinnitus triggered by exposure to loud sound.
It has demonstrated that physical changes in myelin itself -the coating of the auditory nerve carrying sound signals to the brain – affect our ability to hear.
Dr Martine Hamann, Lecturer in Neurosciences at the University of Leicester, said: “People who suffer from hearing loss have difficulties in understanding speech, particularly when the environment is noisy and when other people are talking nearby.
“Understanding speech relies on fast transmission of auditory signals. Therefore it is important to understand how the speed of signal transmission gets decreased during hearing loss. Understanding these underlying phenomena means that it could be possible to find medicines to improve auditory perception, specifically in noisy backgrounds.”
The research, funded by Action on Hearing Loss, and led by Leicester, was done in collaboration with Dr Angus Brown of the University of Nottingham. The research, Computational modelling of the effects of auditory nerve dysmyelination is published in Frontiers in Neuroanatomy.
Dr Ralph Holme, Head of Biomedical Research at Action on Hearing Loss, the only UK charity dedicated to funding research into hearing loss said: “There is an urgent need for effective treatments to prevent hearing loss - a condition that affects 10 million people in the UK and all too often isolates people from friends and family. This research further increases our understanding of the biological consequences of exposure to loud noise. Knowledge that we hope will lead to effective treatments for hearing loss within a generation.”
In previous research, researchers have shown that after exposure to loud sounds leading to hearing loss, the myelin coat surrounding the auditory nerve becomes thinner. An important property of auditory signal transmission consists of electrical signals “jumping” from one myelin domain to the other. Those domains, called Nodes of Ranvier, become elongated after exposure to loud sound.
Dr Hamann said: “Although we showed that transmission of auditory signals (electrical signals transmitted along the auditory nerve) was slowed down after exposure to loud sound leading to hearing loss, the question remained: Is this due to the actual change of the physical properties of the myelin or is it due to the redistribution of channels occurring subsequent to those changes?
“This work is a theoretical work whereby we tested the hypothesis that myelin was the prime reason for the decreased signal transmission. We simulated how physical changes to the myelin and/or redistribution of channels influenced the signal transmission along the auditory nerve. We found that the redistribution of channels had only small effect on the conduction velocity whereas physical changes to myelin were primarily responsible for the effects.”
The research has shown for the first time the closer links between a deficit in the “myelin” sheath surrounding the auditory nerve and hearing loss. “This research is innovative because data modelling (simulations) was used on previous morphological data and assessed that physical changes to the myelin coat were the principal cause of the deficit,” said Dr Hamman.
“We have come closer to understanding the reasons behind deficits in auditory perception. This means that we can also get closer to target those deficits, for example by promoting myelin repair after acoustic trauma or during age related hearing loss.”
Dr Hamann said the work will help prevention as well as progression into finding appropriate cures for hearing loss and possibly tinnitus developing from hearing loss.
“The sense of achievement comes from the fact that it could help ageing people to better understand their relatives on the phone,” said Dr Hamann.
The next step is to test drugs that could promote myelin repair and improve hearing after hearing loss.
(Source: www2.le.ac.uk)
Filed under hearing loss deafness myelin sheath auditory nerve aging neuroscience science
