Multiple sclerosis (MS) is an autoimmune disease that affects the central nervous system which can lead to blurred vision, balance issues, tremors and even paralysis amongst other issues.

An estimated 2.1 million people have MS but it is believed to be much higher because the CDC does not require U.S. physicians to report new cases.

In a study recently published in the Journal of Neuroscience, University of Minnesota neuroscientist Wensheng Lin, M.D., Ph.D., took a closer look at the relationship of myelin and oligodendrocytes (cells responsible for the formation of myelin in the central nervous system) in mice with MS.

Researchers at the University of Minnesota’s Center for Drug Design have developed a synthetic compound that, in a mouse model, successfully prevents the neurodegeneration associated with Alzheimer’s disease.

In the pre-clinical study, researchers Robert Vince, Ph.D.; Swati More, Ph.D.; and Ashish Vartak, Ph.D., of the University’s Center for Drug Design, found evidence that a lab-made compound known as psi-GSH enables the brain to use its own protective enzyme system, called glyoxalase, against the Alzheimer’s disease process.

The discovery is published online in the American Chemical Society journal ACS Chemical Neuroscience and presents a new target for the design of anti-Alzheimer’s and related drugs …

Margaret Mahan, a Ph.D. student at the U of M, believes a better understanding of the brain throughout the lifespan is especially valuable to the aging population with potential application worldwide.

Like any other organ of the body, the brain needs to be assessed to evaluate its status.

However, a comprehensive evaluation of brain structure and function is currently impossible, mainly due to the lack of rigorous, effective and efficient ways to combine diverse information from various tests and measurements and reduce it to simple and meaningful measures of brain status. Such measures, together with cognitive performance, would lead to an integrative assessment of brain and cognition of significant practical value.

The healthy brain project taking place at the Brain Sciences Center at the Minneapolis VA Medical Center, aims to acquire comprehensive, multimodal data to derive composite descriptors of brain status and associate them with cognitive, language and genetic information.  Specifically, variations of MRI data, resting Magnetoencephalography (MEG) for fine grain measure of neural communication, blood for DNA, Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) and the assessment of spoken speech and language are acquired.

The project design, led by Apostolos Georgopoulos, M.D., Ph.D., Regents Professor in the University of Minnesota Medical School’s Department of Neuroscience, collects data from many subjects and restudies subjects each year.  The goal is to add 100 new subjects per year plus 100 from each prior year. Dr. Georgopoulos directs a team of more than 15 people in the recruiting, screening, testing and interpretation of subjects involved in the healthy brain project.

So what does the project aim to do?

The latest issue of the Minnesota Medical Foundation’s Neurosciences News publication is now available in print and online.

Neurosciences News is a publication for those who support brain, nerve and muscle disease research, education and care at the University of Minnesota.

Click here to see a snapshot of the news and updates from the latest issue.