Ageing brain & cognitive decline research, might have relevance to ME & CFS...

C

Cinders66

Senior Member (Voting Rights)
Chemicals 'repair damaged neurons in mice' http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-47234787

2 studies on mice
First is on leaky brain barrier and inflammation
One team, from the University of California, Berkeley, showed MRI scans which indicated that mental decline may be caused by molecules leaking into the brain.

Blood vessels in the brain are different from those in other parts of the body. They protect the organ by allowing only nutrients, oxygen and some drugs to flow through into the brain, but block larger, potentially damaging molecules. This is known as the blood-brain barrier.

The scans revealed that this barrier becomes increasingly leaky as we get older. For example, 30-40% of people in their 40s have some disruption to their blood-brain barrier, compared with 60% of 60-year-olds.

The scans also showed that the brain was inflamed in the leaky areas.

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Image copyrightAAAS
Image captionThe coloured areas show brain inflammation
Prof Daniela Kaufer, who leads the Berkeley group, said that young mice altered to have leaky blood-brain barriers showed many signs of aging. She discovered a chemical that stops the damage to the barrier from causing inflammation to the brain.

Prof Kaufer told BBC News that not only did the chemical stop the genetically altered young mice from showing signs of aging, it reversed the signs of aging in older mice.

"When you think of brain aging you think about the degeneration of cells and losing what we have," she said.

"What these results show is that you are not losing anything. The cells are still there and they just needed to be 'unmasked' by reducing the inflammation."
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Second study

Brain's weak link
In another study, Canadian researchers also said they could reverse cognitive decline in mice using an alternative approach.

They targeted a brain cell known to be a "weak link" in many brain disorders. The so-called somatostatin-positive neurons, which are involved in coding information, are the first to fail. The signals from these cells are too weak to be received by surrounding neurons, which would relay the information to other parts of the brain.

Prof Etienne Sibille, from the University of Toronto, identified a chemical that essentially amplifies the signal. He presented results that showed that older mice who could not find their way around mazes were able to do this after they were given the chemical, just as well as younger mice not given the drug.

Prof Sibille said he was hoping to begin clinical trials on human patients in two years' time.

"If people have a cognitive deficit we would potentially be able to bring them back to higher functioning."

The big caveat is that the vast majority of treatments that show promise in mice don't work on humans. But both scientists believe that this time it might be different
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I note it’s mri scans used In the first study. Has this research been done in ME and shown anything anyone? I remember hearing about impaired blood barrier but i don’t know if that was just hypothesis or tested. Surely if we had scans come back like this it would be validating ?
 
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