Latest Dopamine Stories

A new and powerful class of antioxidants could one day be a potent treatment for Parkinson's disease, researchers report. A class of antioxidants called synthetic triterpenoids blocked development of Parkinson's in an animal model that develops the disease in a handful of days, said Dr. Bobby Thomas, neuroscientist at the Medical College of Georgia at Georgia Health Sciences University and corresponding author of the study in the journal Antioxidants & Redox Signaling. Thomas and...

In the insect brain, dopamine-releasing nerve cells are crucial to the formation of both punished and rewarded memories Children quickly learn to avoid negative situations and seek positive ones. But humans are not the only species capable of remembering positive and negative events; even the small brain of a fruit fly has this capacity. Dopamine-containing nerve cells connected with the mushroom body of the fly brain play a role here. Scientists from the Max Planck Institute of...

Novel system will help treat diseases like Parkinson's, Tourette's and depression Mayo Clinic researchers have found a novel way to monitor real-time chemical changes in the brains of patients undergoing deep brain stimulation (DBS). The groundbreaking insight will help physicians more effectively use DBS to treat brain disorders such as Parkinson's disease, depression and Tourette syndrome. The findings are published in the journal Mayo Clinic Proceedings. Journalists: For multimedia...

Connie K. Ho for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online The debate regarding nurture versus nature is contentious. New research delves into discussion with a study on the impact of genes on school achievement. According to the American Psychological Association (APA), researchers have determined that genetic markets could impact whether a person graduates high school and continues onto higher education. The study, published in the July issue of the APA’s Development Psychology, is...

Deep brain stimulation reduces binge eating in mice, suggesting that this surgery, which is approved for treatment of certain neurologic and psychiatric disorders, may also be an effective therapy for obesity. Presentation of the results will take place Sunday at The Endocrine Society's 94th Annual Meeting in Houston. "Doing brain surgery for obesity treatment is a controversial idea," said the study's presenting author, Casey Halpern, MD, a fifth-year neurosurgery resident physician at...

A group of Spanish researchers has discovered a new function of the neurotransmitter dopamine in controlling sleep regulation. Dopamine acts in the pineal gland, which is central to dictating the 'circadian rhythm' in humans—the series of biological processes that enables brain activity to adapt to the time of the day (that is, light and dark cycles). The researchers, from the CIBERNED (Centro de Investigación Biomédica en Red de Enfermedades Neurodegenerativas), dependant on the Spanish...

DUBLIN, June 18, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Today Abbott (NYSE: ABT) announced results from five abstracts evaluating levodopa-carbidopa intestinal gel (LCIG), its investigational compound for advanced Parkinson's disease. The abstracts include the results from the second interim analysis of a long-term safety and tolerability trial, as well as secondary endpoint analyses from the Phase 3 pivotal trial. All of the abstracts were presented at The 16th International Congress of Parkinson's...

Study shows people who have lower levels of the brain chemical are more likely to be aggressive when provoked in competitive situations Out of control competitive aggression could be a result of a lagging neurotransmitter called dopamine, say researchers presenting a study at the Society of Nuclear Medicine's 2012 Annual Meeting. During a computer game against a putative cheating adversary, participants who had a lower capacity to synthesize this neurotransmitter in the brain were more...

PET imaging studies reveal how an inoculation against cocaine addiction uses the body's own immune system to prevent a high Addicts unable to kick a cocaine habit could one day be vaccinated against cocaine and see proof with a molecular imaging technique that shows how the vaccine prompts antibodies to whisk away the drug before it can reach the brain, say researchers at SNM's 59th Annual Meeting. "Vaccination offers a whole new treatment paradigm for drug addiction," says Shankar...

Using rabies virus, researcher tracks inputs to dopamine neurons A genetically-modified version of the rabies virus is helping scientists at Harvard to trace neural pathways in the brain, a research effort that could one day lead to treatments for Parkinson's disease and addiction. As described in a paper published on June 7 in the journal Neuron, a team of researchers led by Associate Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology Naoshige Uchida used the virus to create the first-ever...