Smelling Parkinson's - Neuralink User - Regulating Inflammation - Hippocampal Tail
Breedlove, S
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/14/magazine/parkinsons-smell-disease-detection.html
The Woman Who Could Smell Parkinson’s
By Scott Sayare
As a boy, Les Milne carried an air of triumph about him, and an air of sorrow. Les was a particularly promising and energetic young man, an all-Scottish swim champion, head boy at his academy in Dundee, a top student bound for medical school. But when he was young, his father died; his mother was institutionalized with a diagnosis of manic depression, and he and his younger brother were effectively left to fend for themselves. His high school girlfriend, Joy, was drawn to him as much by his sadness as his talents, by his yearning for her care. “We were very, very much in love,” Joy, now a flaxen-haired 72-year-old grandmother, told me recently. In a somewhat less conventional way, she also adored the way Les smelled, and this aroma of salt and musk, accented with a suggestion of leather from the carbolic soap he used at the pool, formed for her a lasting sense of who he was. “It was just him,” Joy said, a steadfast marker of his identity, no less distinctive than his face, his voice, his particular quality of mind.
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Joy’s had always been an unusually sensitive nose, the inheritance, she believes, of her maternal line. Her grandmother was a “hyperosmic,” and she encouraged Joy, as a child, to make the most of her abilities, quizzing her on different varieties of rose, teaching her to distinguish the scent of the petals from the scent of the leaves from the scent of the pistils and stamens. Still, her grandmother did not think odor of any kind to be a polite topic of conversation, and however rich and enjoyable and dense with information the olfactory world might be, she urged her granddaughter to keep her experience of it to herself. Les only learned of Joy’s peculiar nose well after their relationship began, on a trip to the Scandinavian far north. Joy would not stop going on about the creamy odor of the tundra, or what she insisted was the aroma of the cold itself.
Joy planned to go off to university in Paris or Rome. Faced with the prospect of tending to his mother alone, however, Les begged her to stay in Scotland. He trained as a doctor, she as a nurse; they married during his residency. He was soon the sort of capable young physician one might hope to meet, a practitioner of uncommon enthusiasm, and shortly after his 30th birthday, he was appointed consultant anesthesiologist at Macclesfield District General Hospital, outside Manchester, in England, the first in his graduating class to make consultant.
© 2024 The New York Times Company
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What It’s like to Live with a Brain Chip, according to Neuralink’s First User
By Lauren Leffer
Noland Arbaugh has a computer chip embedded in his skull and an electrode array in his brain. But Arbaugh, the first user of the Neuralink brain-computer interface, or BCI, says he wouldn’t know the hardware was there if he didn’t remember going through with the surgery. “If I had lost my memory, and I woke up, and you told me there was something implanted in my brain, then I probably wouldn’t believe you,” says the 30-year-old Arizona resident, who has been paralyzed below the middle of his neck since a 2016 swimming accident. “I have no sensation of it—no way of telling it’s there unless someone goes and physically pushes on it.”
The Neuralink chip may be physically unobtrusive, but Arbaugh says it’s had a big impact on his life, allowing him to “reconnect with the world.” He underwent robotic surgery in January to receive the N1 Implant, also called “the Link,” in Neuralink’s first approved human trial.
BCIs have existed for decades. But because billionaire technologist Elon Musk owns Neuralink, the company has received outsize attention. It’s brought renewed public interest to a technology that could significantly improve the life of those living with quadriplegia, such as Arbaugh, as well as people with other disabilities or neurodegenerative diseases.
BCIs record electrical activity in the brain and translate those data into output actions, such as opening and closing a robotic hand or clicking a computer mouse. They vary in their design, level of invasiveness and the resolution of the information they capture. Some detect neurons’ electrical activity with entirely external electroencephalogram (EEG) arrays placed over a subject’s head. Others use electrodes placed on the brain’s surface to track neural activity. Then there are intracortical devices, which use electrodes implanted directly into brain tissue, to get as close as possible to the targeted neurons. Neuralink’s implant falls into this category.
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https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-brainstem-fine-tunes-inflammation-throughout-the-body-20240614/
The Brainstem Fine-Tunes Inflammation Throughout the Body
By Esther Landhuis
Last month, researchers discovered cells in the brainstem that regulate inflammation throughout the body. In response to an injury, these nerve cells not only sense inflammatory molecules, but also dial their circulating levels up and down to keep infections from harming healthy tissues. The discovery adds control of the immune system to the brainstem’s core functions — a list that also includes monitoring heart rate, breathing and aspects of taste — and suggests new potential targets for treating inflammatory disorders like arthritis and inflammatory bowel disease.
During an intense workout or high-stakes exam, your brain can sense the spike in your heart rate and help restore a normal rhythm. Likewise, the brain can help stabilize your blood pressure by triggering chemical signals that widen or constrict blood vessels. Such feats often go unnoticed, but they illustrate a fundamental concept of physiology known as homeostasis — the capacity of organisms to keep their internal systems working smoothly and stably amid shifting circumstances.
Now, in a paper published on May 1 in Nature, researchers describe how homeostatic control extends even to the sprawl of cells and tissues that comprise our immune system.
The team applied a clever genetic approach in mice to identify cells in the brainstem that adjust immune reactions to pathogens and other outside triggers. These neurons operate like a “volume controller” that keeps the animals’ inflammatory responses within a physiological range, said paper author Hao Jin, a neuroimmunologist at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
© 2024 Simons Foundation.
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Tail of hippocampus may be hub for seizures in mice and people
By Shaena Montanari
Five years ago, while working to develop a tool to label neurons active during seizures in mice, Quynh Anh Nguyen noticed something she had not seen before.
“There was a particular region in the brain that seemed to light up really prominently,” she says.
Nguyen, assistant professor of pharmacology at Vanderbilt University, had induced seizures in the animals by injecting kainic acid into the hippocampus—a common strategy to model temporal lobe epilepsy. The condition often involves hyperactivity in the anterior and middle regions of the hippocampus, but Nguyen’s mice also showed the activation in a tiny posterior part of the hippocampus that she was not familiar with.
Nguyen brought the data to her then-supervisor Ivan Soltesz, professor of neurosciences and neurosurgery at Stanford University. Together they realized that these neurons were in an area called the fasciola cinereum—a subregion of the hippocampus so understudied, Soltesz says, that when Nguyen first asked him what it was, he had “no idea.”
Despite the subregion’s obscurity, it looks to be an important and previously overlooked contributor to epilepsy in people who do not respond to anti-seizure medications or tissue ablation in the hippocampus, Nguyen and her colleagues say. Fasciola cinereum neurons were active during seizures in six people with drug-resistant epilepsy, the team reported in April.
© 2024 Simons Foundation
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https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/15/magazine/alcohol-health-risks.html
Is That Drink Worth It to You?
By Susan Dominus
About a year ago, a friend of mine started evading my invitations to grab a drink. It was only when we caught up for a walk that she explained she wasn’t putting me off for any personal reason — it was just that she had stopped drinking. She wasn’t a heavy drinker — she had a glass of wine with dinner, the occasional Aperol spritz — but she’d been hearing on podcasts and reading in the news that even a small amount of alcohol was much worse for her health than had previously been understood.
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My friend was picking up on a swing in the public-health messaging around alcohol. For many years, she might have felt that she was making a healthy choice in having a glass of wine or a beer with dinner. Right around the time when she came of legal age to drink, the early 1990s, some prominent researchers were promoting, and the media helped popularize, the idea that moderate drinking — for women, a drink a night; for men, two — was linked to greater longevity. The cause of that association was not clear, but red wine, researchers theorized, might have anti-inflammatory properties that extended life and protected cardiovascular health. Major health organizations and some doctors always warned that alcohol consumption was linked to higher cancer risk, but the dominant message moderate drinkers heard was one of not just reassurance but encouragement.
More recently, though, research has piled up debunking the idea that moderate drinking is good for you. Last year, a major meta-analysis that re-examined 107 studies over 40 years came to the conclusion that no amount of alcohol improves health; and in 2022, a well-designed study found that consuming even a small amount brought some risk to heart health. That same year, Nature published research stating that consuming as little as one or two drinks a day (even less for women) was associated with shrinkage in the brain — a phenomenon normally associated with aging.
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