Much thought has been given to the impact of Amyloid Beta, Tau and Alpha-Synuclein in the development of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and Parkinson’s disease (PD), yet the clinical failures of the recent decades indicate that there are further pathological mechanisms at work. Indeed, besides amyloids, AD and PD are characterized by the culminative interplay of oxidative stress, mitochondrial dysfunction and hyperfission, defective autophagy and mitophagy, systemic inflammation, BBB and vascular damage, demyelination, cerebral insulin resistance, the loss of dopamine production in PD, impaired neurogenesis and, of course, widespread axonal, synaptic and neuronal degeneration that leads to cognitive and motor impediments. Interestingly, the acylated form of the hormone ghrelin has shown the potential to ameliorate the latter pathologic changes, although some studies indicate a few complications that need to be considered in the long-term administration of the hormone. As such, this review will illustrate the wide-ranging neuroprotective properties of acylated ghrelin and critically evaluate the hormone’s therapeutic benefits for the treatment of AD and PD.Progranulin (PGRN) is a tightly regulated, secreted glycoprotein involved in a wide range of biological processes that is of tremendous interest to the scientific community due to its involvement in neoplastic, neurodevelopmental, and neurodegenerative diseases. In particular, progranulin haploinsufficiency leads to frontotemporal dementia. While performing experiments with a HIS-tagged recombinant human (rh) PGRN protein, we observed a measurable depletion of protein from solution due to its adsorption onto polypropylene (PPE) microcentrifuge tubes. In this study, we have quantified the extent of rhPGRN adsorption to PPE tubes while varying experimental conditions, including incubation time and temperature. We found that ∼25-35% of rhPGRN becomes adsorbed to the surface of PPE tubes even after a short incubation period. We then directly showed the deleterious impact of PGRN adsorption in functional assays and have recommended alternative labware to minimize these effects. Although the risk of adsorption of some purified proteins and peptides to polymer plastics has been characterized previously, this is the first report of rhPGRN adsorption. Moreover, since PGRN is currently being studied and utilized in both basic science laboratories to perform in vitro studies and translational laboratories to survey PGRN as a quantitative dementia biomarker and potential replacement therapy, the reported observations here are broadly impactful and will likely significantly affect the design and interpretation of future experiments centered on progranulin biology.

Regional changes to cortical thickness in individuals with neurodegenerative and cerebrovascular diseases (CVD) can be estimated using specialized neuroimaging software. However, the presence of cerebral small vessel disease, focal atrophy, and cortico-subcortical stroke lesions, pose significant challenges that increase the likelihood of misclassification errors and segmentation failures.

The main goal of this study was to examine a correction procedure developed for enhancing FreeSurfer’s (FS’s) cortical thickness estimation tool, particularly when applied to the most challenging MRI obtained from participants with chronic stroke and CVD, with varying degrees of neurovascular lesions and brain atrophy.

In 155 CVD participants enrolled in the Ontario Neurodegenerative Disease Research Initiative (ONDRI), FS outputs were compared between a fully automated, unmodified procedure and a corrected procedure that accounted for potential sources of error due to atrophy and neurovascular lesions. Quality controa positive association between left superior parietal cortical thickness and Attention (

< 0.001).

These findings suggest that correction procedures which account for brain atrophy and neurovascular lesions can significantly improve FS’s segmentation results and reduce failure rates, thus maximizing power by preventing the loss of our important study participants. Future work will examine relationships between cortical thickness, cerebral small vessel disease, and cognitive dysfunction due to neurodegenerative disease in the ONDRI study.

These findings suggest that correction procedures which account for brain atrophy and neurovascular lesions can significantly improve FS’s segmentation results and reduce failure rates, thus maximizing power by preventing the loss of our important study participants. Future work will examine relationships between cortical thickness, cerebral small vessel disease, and cognitive dysfunction due to neurodegenerative disease in the ONDRI study.Cochlear implants (CI) improve hearing for the severely hearing impaired. With an extension of implantation candidacy, today many CI listeners use a hearing aid on their contralateral ear, referred to as bimodal listening. It is uncertain, however, whether the brains of bimodal listeners can combine the electrical and acoustical sound information and how much CI experience is needed to achieve an improved performance with bimodal listening. Patients with bilateral sensorineural hearing loss undergoing implant surgery were tested in their ability to understand speech in quiet and in noise, before and again 3 and 6 months after provision of a CI. Results of these bimodal listeners were compared to age-matched, normal hearing controls (NH). The benefit of adding a contralateral hearing aid was calculated in terms of head shadow, binaural summation, binaural squelch, and spatial release from masking from the results of a sentence recognition test. Beyond that, bimodal benefit was estimated from the difference in ilar for NH and the bimodal group, source localization showed group-dependent differences in auditory and speech-relevant cortex, suggesting different processing in the bimodal listeners.Electroencephalograms (EEG) are one of the most commonly used measures to study brain functioning at a macroscopic level. The structure of the EEG time series is composed of many neural rhythms interacting at different spatiotemporal scales. check details This interaction is often named as cross frequency coupling, and consists of transient couplings between various parameters of different rhythms. This coupling has been hypothesized to be a basic mechanism involved in cognitive functions. There are several methods to measure cross frequency coupling between two rhythms but no single method has been selected as the gold standard. Current methods only serve to explore two rhythms at a time, are computationally demanding, and impose assumptions about the nature of the signal. Here we present a new approach based on Information Theory in which we can characterize the interaction of more than two rhythms in a given EEG time series. It estimates the mutual information of multiple rhythms (MIMR) extracted from the original signal.