From: 23x11.5c@gmail.com   
      
   Electric Current to Brain Boosts Memory   
   Discovery may help treat memory disorders resulting from stroke, Alzheimer's   
   and brain injury.   
       
   Neuroscience News     
   August 28, 2014     
   Featured, Neuroscience   
      
   Discovery may help treat memory disorders resulting from stroke, Alzheimer's   
   and brain injury.   
      
   Stimulating a particular region in the brain via non-invasive delivery of   
   electrical current using magnetic pulses, called Transcranial Magnetic   
   Stimulation, improves memory, reports a new Northwestern Medicine study.   
      
   The discovery opens a new field of possibilities for treating memory   
   impairments caused by conditions such as stroke, early-stage Alzheimer's   
   disease, traumatic brain injury, cardiac arrest and the memory problems that   
   occur in healthy aging.   
      
   "We show for the first time that you can specifically change memory functions   
   of the brain in adults without surgery or drugs, which have not proven   
   effective," said senior author Joel Voss, assistant professor of medical   
   social sciences at Northwestern    
   University Feinberg School of Medicine. "This noninvasive stimulation improves   
   the ability to learn new things. It has tremendous potential for treating   
   memory disorders."   
      
   The study will be published August 29 in Science.   
      
   The study also is the first to demonstrate that remembering events requires a   
   collection of many brain regions to work in concert with a key memory   
   structure called the hippocampus - similar to a symphony orchestra. The   
   electrical stimulation is like    
   giving the brain regions a more talented conductor so they play in closer   
   synchrony.   
      
   "It's like we replaced their normal conductor with Muti," Voss said, referring   
   to Riccardo Muti, the music director of the renowned Chicago Symphony   
   Orchestra. "The brain regions played together better after the stimulation."   
      
   This image shows the TMS being used.   
   When TMS was used to stimulate this spot, regions in the brain involved with   
   the hippocampus became more synchronized with each other, as indicated by data   
   taken while subjects were inside an MRI machine, which records the blood flow   
   in the brain as an    
   indirect measure of neuronal activity. Credit Northwestern University.   
   The approach also has potential for treating mental disorders such as   
   schizophrenia in which these brain regions and the hippocampus are out of sync   
   with each other, affecting memory and cognition.   
      
   TMS Boosts Memory   
      
   The Northwestern study is the first to show TMS improves memory long after   
   treatment. In the past, TMS has been used in a limited way to temporarily   
   change brain function to improve performance during a test, for example,   
   making someone push a button    
   slightly faster while the brain is being stimulated. The study shows that TMS   
   can be used to improve memory for events at least 24 hours after the   
   stimulation is given.   
      
   Finding the Sweet Spot   
      
   It isn't possible to directly stimulate the hippocampus with TMS because it's   
   too deep in the brain for the magnetic fields to penetrate. So, using an MRI   
   scan, Voss and colleagues identified a superficial brain region a mere   
   centimeter from the surface    
   of the skull with high connectivity to the hippocampus. He wanted to see if   
   directing the stimulation to this spot would in turn stimulate the   
   hippocampus. It did.   
      
   "I was astonished to see that it worked so specifically," Voss said.   
      
   When TMS was used to stimulate this spot, regions in the brain involved with   
   the hippocampus became more synchronized with each other, as indicated by data   
   taken while subjects were inside an MRI machine, which records the blood flow   
   in the brain as an    
   indirect measure of neuronal activity.   
      
   The more those regions worked together due to the stimulation, the better   
   people were able to learn new information.   
      
   How the Study Worked   
      
   Scientists recruited 16 healthy adults ages 21 to 40. Each had a detailed   
   anatomical image taken of his or her brain as well as 10 minutes of recording   
   brain activity while lying quietly inside an MRI scanner. Doing this allowed   
   the researchers to    
   identify each person's network of brain structures that are involved in memory   
   and well connected to the hippocampus. The structures are slightly different   
   in each person and may vary in location by as much as a few centimeters.   
      
   "To properly target the stimulation, we had to identify the structures in each   
   person's brain space because everyone's brain is different," Voss said.   
      
   Each participant then underwent a memory test, consisting of a set of   
   arbitrary associations between faces and words that they were asked to learn   
   and remember. After establishing their baseline ability to perform on this   
   memory task, participants    
   received brain stimulation 20 minutes a day for five consecutive days.   
      
   During the week they also received additional MRI scans and tests of their   
   ability to remember new sets of arbitrary word and face parings to see how   
   their memory changed as a result of the stimulation. Then, at least 24 hours   
   after the final stimulation,   
    they were tested again.   
      
   At least one week later, the same experiment was repeated but with a fake   
   placebo stimulation. The order of real stimulation and placebo portions of the   
   study was reversed for half of the participants, and they weren't told which   
   was which.   
      
   Both groups performed better on memory tests as a result of the brain   
   stimulation. It took three days of stimulation before they improved.   
      
   "They remembered more face-word pairings after the stimulation than before,   
   which means their learning ability improved," Voss said. "That didn't happen   
   for the placebo condition or in another control experiment with additional   
   subjects."   
      
   In addition, the MRI showed the stimulation caused the brain regions to become   
   more synchronized with each other and the hippocampus. The greater the   
   improvement in the synchronicity or connectivity between specific parts of the   
   network, the better the    
   performance on the memory test. "The more certain brain regions worked   
   together because of the stimulation, the more people were able to learn   
   face-word pairings, " Voss said.   
      
   Using TMS to stimulate memory has multiple advantages, noted first author Jane   
   Wang, a postdoctoral fellow in Voss's lab at Feinberg. "No medication could be   
   as specific as TMS for these memory networks," Wang said. "There are a lot of   
   different targets    
   and it's not easy to come up with any one receptor that's involved in memory."   
      
   The Future   
      
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)