Background: Chronic liver diseases such as hepatic tumors can affect the brain through the liver–brain axis, leading to neurotransmitter dysregulation and behavioral changes. Cancer patients suffer from fatigue, which can be associated with sleep disturbances. Sleep is regulated via two interlocked mechanisms: homeostatic regulation and the circadian system. In mammals, the hypothalamic suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN) is the key component of the circadian system. It generates circadian rhythms in physiology and behavior and controls their entrainment to the surrounding light/dark cycle. Neuron–glia interactions are crucial for the functional integrity of the SCN. Under pathological conditions, oxidative stress can compromise these interactions and thus circadian timekeeping and entrainment.

Scientists at Johns Hopkins have grown a first-of-its-kind organoid mimicking an entire human brain, complete with rudimentary blood vessels and neural activity. This new “multi-region brain organoid” connects different brain parts, producing electrical signals and simulating early brain development. By watching these mini-brains evolve, researchers hope to uncover how conditions like autism or schizophrenia arise, and even test treatments in ways never before possible with animal models.

Both for research and medical purposes, researchers have spent decades pushing the limits of microscopy to produce ever deeper and sharper images of brain activity, not only in the cortex but also in regions underneath such as the hippocampus. In a new study, a team of MIT scientists and engineers demonstrates a new microscope system capable of peering exceptionally deep into brain tissues to detect the molecular activity of individual cells by using sound.

“The major advance here is to enable us to image deeper at single-cell resolution,” said neuroscientist Mriganka Sur, a corresponding author along with mechanical engineering Professor Peter So and principal research scientist Brian Anthony. Sur is the Paul and Lilah Newton Professor in The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory and the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT.

In the journal Light: Science and Applications, the team demonstrates that they could detect NAD℗H, a molecule tightly associated with cell metabolism in general, and electrical activity in neurons in particular, all the way through samples such as a 1.1 mm “cerebral organoid,” a 3D-mini brain-like tissue generated from human stem cells, and a 0.7 mm thick slice of mouse brain tissue.

Oxygen deprivation around birth can lead to brain damage in babies, with far-reaching consequences. A new stem cell treatment administered via nasal drops is showing promising results. In a safety study conducted at UMC Utrecht, called PASSIoN, ten newborns received this ‘intranasal stem cell therapy’ shortly after birth. Most of the children showed remarkably positive development: they started walking earlier on average than untreated children with comparable brain damage, had no motor impairments, and none developed epilepsy or visual problems. The study results were published today in the scientific journal Stroke.

All ten babies in the study had a perinatal stroke: a type of brain injury that occurs just before, during, or shortly after birth, damaging the developing brain. This kind of injury can lead to long-term neurological problems such as cerebral palsy (CP), a condition that affects movement due to early brain damage.

What is the earliest spark that ignites the memory-robbing march of Alzheimer’s disease? Why do some people with Alzheimer’s-like changes in the brain never go on to develop dementia? These questions have bedeviled neuroscientists for decades.

Now, a team of researchers at Harvard Medical School may have found an answer: lithium deficiency in the brain.

The work, published in Nature, shows for the first time that lithium occurs naturally in the brain, shields it from neurodegeneration, and maintains the normal function of all major brain cell types.