See Inside Neurodegenerative disorders devastate the brain, but doctors hope one day to replace lost cells By Ferris Jabr BRAIN GROWTH: To replace brain cells lost to neurodegenerative disorders such as Parkinson's disease, some researchers are experimenting with grafts of fetal brain tissue and injections of young neurons grown from stem cells in the lab. Image: Bryan Christie Inside the human brain, branching neurons grow beside, around and on top of one another like trees in a dense forest. Scientists used to think that any neurons that wilted and died from injury or disease were gone forever because the brain had no way to replace those cells. By the 1990s, however, most neuroscientists had accepted that the adult brain cultivates small gardens of stem cells that can turn into mature neurons. This article was originally published with the title Replanting the Brain's Forest. Excerpt from: Neural Stem Cell Transplants May One Day Help Parkinson 's Patients, Others (preview) … Continue reading →

Newswise Washington, D.C. (April 6, 2013) Researchers from Tel Aviv University describe experiments that could lead to a new approach for treating Parkinsons disease (PD) using a common sweetener, mannitol. This research is presented today at the Genetics Society of Americas 54th Annual Drosophila Research Conference in Washington D.C., April 3-7, 2013. Mannitol is a sugar alcohol familiar as a component of sugar-free gum and candies. Originally isolated from flowering ash, mannitol is believed to have been the manna that rained down from the heavens in biblical times. Fungi, bacteria, algae, and plants make mannitol, but the human body cant. For most commercial uses it is extracted from seaweed although chemists can synthesize it. And it can be used for more than just a sweetener. The Food and Drug Administration approved mannitol as an intravenous diuretic to flush out excess fluid. It also enables drugs to cross the blood-brain barrier (BBB), the tightly linked cells that form the walls of capillaries in the brain. The tight junctions holding together the cells of these tiniest blood vessels come slightly apart five minutes after an infusion of mannitol into the carotid artery, and they stay open for about 30 minutes. Mannitol has … Continue reading →