Latest Microglia Stories

redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports - Your Universe Online New research published Thursday in the journal Neuron sheds new light on the molecular causes of Alzheimer’s disease, while also revealing a potential new therapy which could help prevent cognitive decline and brain damage during the early stages of the neurodegenerative disorder. The study focuses on a variant of a gene known as CD33, which typically contributes to Alzheimer’s disease by inhibiting the ability of a body’s...

Researcher Johan Jakobsson and his colleagues have now published their results in Nature Communications "At present, researchers know very little about exactly how microglia work. At the same time, there is a lot of curiosity and high hopes among brain researchers that greater understanding of microglia could lead to entirely new drug development strategies for various brain diseases", says Johan Jakobsson, research group leader at the Division of Molecular Neurogenetics at Lund...

Study finds chronic inflammation, suppression of cell regeneration, and neuronal cell loss contribute to wide range of motor and cognitive deficits Researchers from the University of South Florida and colleagues at the James A. Haley Veterans' Hospital studying the long-term consequences of traumatic brain injury (TBI) using rat models, have found that, overtime, TBI results in progressive brain deterioration characterized by elevated inflammation and suppressed cell regeneration. However,...

A research team composed of University of Kentucky researchers has published a paper which provides the first direct evidence that activated astrocytes could play a harmful role in Alzheimer's disease. The UK Sanders-Brown Center on Aging has also received significant new National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding to further this line of study. Chris Norris, an associate professor in the UK College of Medicine Department of Molecular and Biomedical Pharmacology, as well as a member of the...

In many pathologies of the nervous system, there is a common event - cells called microglia are activated from surveillant watchmen into fighters. Microglia are the immune cells of the nervous system, ingesting and destroying pathogens and damaged nerve cells. Until now little was known about the molecular mechanisms of microglia activation despite this being a critical process in the body. Now new research from the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital – The Neuro - at McGill...

LA JOLLA, Calif., Sept. 13, 2012 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The Salk Institute announced today that researchers Bjorn Lillemeier, and Axel Nimmerjahn, have been named recipients of the prestigious 2012 National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director's New Innovator Award. The NIH Director's New Innovator Award is a highly selective program with hundreds of researchers from the nation's top scientific institutions competing for the award. Only 51 scientists received the honor this year....

How the brain's emergency workers find the disaster area Like emergency workers rushing to a disaster scene, cells called microglia speed to places where the brain has been injured, to contain the damage by 'eating up' any cellular debris and dead or dying neurons. Scientists at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, Germany, have now discovered exactly how microglia detect the site of injury, thanks to a relay of molecular signals. Their work, published today in...

Researchers have shown in mice how immune cells in the brain target and remove unused connections between brain cells during normal development. This research, supported by the National Institutes of Health, sheds light on how brain activity influences brain development, and highlights the newly found importance of the immune system in how the brain is wired, as well as how the brain forms new connections throughout life in response to change. Disease-fighting cells in the brain, known as...

Findings offer a fresh look at developmental and degenerative brain diseases BOSTON, May 23, 2012 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- We're born with our brains prewired, but as information comes in from our environment, this circuitry is updated. A study from Boston Children's Hospital provides a new glimpse of how this happens: Brain cells known as microglia, tuned into the crosstalk between neurons, literally engulf unnecessary connections, known as synapses, and prune them away. The...

Macrophages play a key role in the immune response, protecting organisms against infection and regulating the development of inflammation in tissue. Macrophages differ depending on where they are located and which tasks they perform. A scientist at TUM has been investigating whether these different types of cells have the same origin – and has come up with some surprising results. His findings reveal that there are two distinct macrophage cell lines that continue into adult life and that...