NIR Spectroscopy Captures the Impacts of Stroke
Every year, approximately 5.5 million people worldwide lose their lives to stroke. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, stroke-related costs in the U.S. total nearly $50 billion annually1. Stroke is the fifth leading cause of death and a major cause of serious disability in adults in the U.S. Because of its impact on the health of those stricken and on society as a whole, several health agencies are committed to funding research to enrich our understanding of its causes and effects. This research, which incorporates a number of imaging modalities, is aimed at answering several key questions: What risk factors contribute to the likelihood of stroke? What is the core mechanism that causes it? What determines prognosis? How does the brain recover?
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Two-Photon Imaging Monitors Brain Synapses During Prolonged Anesthesia
The formation of synapses in the circuitry of the brain, and especially the solidification and disappearance of synaptic structures, mediates how people learn, memorize, and forget. Since the introduction of two-photon imaging to neuroscience in the 1990s, it has been used to image synaptic connections in the brains of living animals. Two-photon imaging has also revealed changes in neural functioning that underlie neuropsychiatric diseases such as epilepsy, multiple sclerosis, and schizophrenia. A recent study of two-photon synaptic imaging of mouse brain during prolonged anesthesia revealed major structural changes in synapses1, highlighting the utility of two-photon microscopy to provide data that could justify shifts in patient care, specifically in intensive care medicine.
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Laser Therapy Reaches Hard-to-Treat Epilepsy
For decades, the most commonly used treatments for epilepsy were pharmaceuticals or resection surgery, which involves removing a segment of brain tissue from where the patient’s seizures originate. These remedies can work well and continue to be the best treatment option in many cases, but they can also cause debilitating side effects. For some patients, drug therapy has proven ineffective, leaving them searching for another solution. Modern laser therapy has been shown in both clinical and proof-of-concept studies to be potentially helpful or even curative for many, because of its unique ability to precisely target affected brain tissue and stop or at least minimize the erratic signals emanating from it.
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