Newswise — Scientists at the University of Virginia School of Medicine have developed a tool to monitor communications within the brain in a way never before possible, and their creation has already offered an explanation for why Alzheimer’s drugs have limited effectiveness and why patients get much worse after going off of them.
The researchers expect their new method will have tremendous impact on our understanding of depression, sleep disorders, autism, neurological diseases and major psychiatric conditions. It will speed scientific research into the workings of the brain, they say, and facilitate the development of new treatments.
“We can now ‘see’ how brain cells communicate in sharp detail in both the healthy and diseased brains,” said lead researcher J. Julius Zhu, PhD, of UVA’s Department of Pharmacology.
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The new method developed…
