By removing organ, treatment of BP set to be revolutionised

Sep 8, 2013, 04.49 AM IST

READ MORE smallest organs|reduce blood pressure|Human body
Removing one of the smallest organs in the human body could dramatically reduce blood pressure in patients who do not respond to medicines, potentially revolutionising treatments for thousands.

Tiny organs, no larger than a grain of rice, called the carotid bodies, located near the artery that carries blood to the head and neck, were found to play a major role in causing and maintaining high levels of blood pressure.

Although the study, carried out by researchers at the University of Bristol and published in Nature Communications , looked at models of high blood pressure in rats, their findings were so significant that they have already led to a human clinical trial in 20 patients, which will be completed early next year.

High blood pressure, or hypertension , affects nearly a third of people in the UK and is known as "the silent killer" because thousands of patients do not know they have the condition. Large numbers of patients do not respond well to the various drug treatments , such as ACE inhibitors and Beta-blockers , that can be prescribed to keep blood pressure low, and still more find it difficult to keep up their medicines regime because of common side effects.

Professor Julian Paton, from Bristol's School of Physiology and Pharmacology , said that the discovery of the carotid bodies' role in causing high blood pressure was unexpected.

"We knew that these tiny organs behaved differently in conditions of hypertension but had absolutely no idea that they contributed so massively to the generation of high blood pressure; this is really most exciting," he said.

The two carotid bodies are located at the point where the carotid artery, which carries blood from the heart, splits into two separate arteries that take blood to the brain and other parts of the head.--THE INDEPENDENT
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'Brain-to-brain interface holds hope for disabled'

, TNN | Sep 6, 2013, 02.19 AM IST

READ MORE University of Washington|LCA project|English language teaching
HYDERABAD: Two researchers of the University of Washington have achieved what is being celebrated as a significant scientific breakthrough. They demonstrated what is called the first human non-invasive brain-to-brain interface.

 One of the two researchers is Rajesh Rao hails from Hyderabad and is now professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Washington. Rao, who studied at Kendriya Vidyalaya, Kanchanbagh, moved to the US to pursue a bachelor's degree in computer science. His father P N A P Rao worked in DRDL and was avionics director in the LCA project. His mother Dr Kamali Rao is a retired professor of English language teaching.

 Even as appreciation poured in for the two researchers, Andrea Stocco and Rajesh Rao, for their achievement, Rajesh Rao replied to an e-mail questionnaire from TOI sharing more information about their significant experiment.

 How did you get the idea of the brain-to-brain interface possibility?

 Perhaps the early inspiration came from hearing our Indian mythological stories of telepathy between rishis and watching Star Trek on Doordarshan, but the actual idea arose from the work in my lab on brain-computer interfacing, where the goal is to help people who are paralyzed and disabled by designing brain-controlled prosthetics.

 Can you explain in detail how you went about your experiment?

 What we demonstrated was a rudimentary form of information being extracted from one human brain and transmitted directly to another. The technology for extracting information from the brain is called EEG (Electroencephalography) and it records tiny electrical fluctuations measurable at the scalp caused by the activities of a large numbers of brain cells -- it is like listening to a crowd watching a cricket match while standing outside the stadium. You cannot hear individual conversations but you know when there's a 4 or 6. In our case, a computer was trained on the EEG signals generated by my brain when I was imagining moving my right hand. When the computer detected this imagery signal, it sent this signal via the internet to a TMS machine in my collaborator's lab. The TMS machine there delivered a magnetic pulse to the part of his brain controlling his wrist and fingers. This caused his wrist and fingers to move involuntarily, hitting the key that fires at the target in the game I was playing. His fingers therefore executed an action based on the imagery signal extracted from my brain.

 What do the findings mean? To what advantage can they be used in science for the benefit of the common people?

 In the distant future, perhaps two persons can communicate who do not have a common language. More immediately, that progress in this area will ultimately lead to better brain-controlled prosthetic devices for the paralyzed and better sensory prostheses for the blind and deaf.

 How confident were you that your experiment would be successful?

 We were optimistic about the experiment but given the many hardware and software components of the experiment spread across two labs, there was always the risk of failure.

 What are you working on next? Through the brain to brain interface, what other motions can be controlled?

 Right now, the kinds of movements that can be elicited are very primitive, amounting to a jerk or a twitch, and depends on where you place the TMS brain stimulator coil. We are currently exploring placing this coil over other brain areas. We are also investigating the possibility of two-way exchange of information instead of a one-way transmission, allowing a "conversation" between two brains.

 What, in your opinion, could also be the pitfalls?

 Any new technology comes with benefits and risks of abuse. The first thought that might come to mind (if you pardon the pun) is "mind control" or "mind reading" where someone controls your actions or reads your thoughts without your knowledge. Fortunately, this kind of ability is quite far from being possible with our current technologies and our current knowledge of neuroscience. However, one of our goals with this experiment was to start the conversation sooner rather than later on the various ethical and moral issues that will arise as brain-to-brain and brain-computer interface technologies become more sophisticated.

 Researcher Rajesh Rao sees benefit for medical science from his brain-to-brain interface
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Potential cure emerges for Down Syndrome

IANS | Sep 5, 2013, 04.33 PM IST
READ MORE Science Translational Medicine|Potential cure|Down Syndrome|Chromosome
WASHINGTON: US researchers may have identified a compound that appears to reverse the learning deficits associated with Down Syndrome in lab mice.

While the use of the compound, a small molecule known as a sonic hedgehog pathway agonist, has not been proven safe for testing on people with Down Syndrome, researchers said Wednesday their experiments hold promise for developing drugs similar to it, reports Xinhua.

Down Syndrome is one of the most common chromosomal abnormalities in children, and a leading cause of intellectual disability.

It occurs when people have three instead of the two usual copies of the chromosome 21.

As a result of this "trisomy", people with Down Syndrome have extra copies of more than 300 genes, leading to intellectual disabilities, distinctive facial features and sometimes heart problems and other health effects.

In their study, the researchers from the Johns Hopkins University and the US National Institute of Health conducted experiments on mice to give them extra copies of about half of the genes found in humans.

The researchers injected the mice the compound right after their birth and found that single injection enabled the cerebellum of the rodents' brains to grow to a normal size.

"Most people with Down Syndrome have a cerebellum that's about 60 percent of the normal size," lead author Roger Reeves of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine argued.

"We treated the Down Syndrome-like mice with a compound we thought might normalise the cerebellum's growth, and it worked beautifully," he said.

"What we didn't expect were the effects on learning and memory, which are generally controlled by the hippocampus, not the cerebellum," he said.

The team tested the mice who had been given the dose with the mice who suffered with the syndrome, and normal mice in a variety of ways, and found that the treated mice did just as well as the normal ones on a test of locating a platform while swimming in a so-called water maze.

Further research, however, is needed to know why exactly the treatment works and if it can be altered for human use, the researchers wrote in the journal Science Translational Medicine.
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